How to embed a survey inside an email invitation

Published 2019-05-31 | By Kiarokh Moattar

Making a survey to email to thousands of email addresses may sound easy. But the main struggle with surveys always is: “Will people be bothered to click on the survey link and respond?”, or “Can I embed my questionnaire inside the email invitation that I’ll send out?”

Luckily, there is a way to do this with SurveyLegend, but there is always a “but”! And it all goes back to how email providers work.

How do email providers work?

Email providers (such as Gmail, Outlook, YahooMail, etc..) have very strict rules when it comes to the type of content that can be embedded inside an email. This is hugely because of security concerns. As we all know, there are loads of fraudulent emails out there, through which senders try to phish for sensitive information. They may have any malicious reason to trick the reader of the email into giving away information such as their bank account number, their personal details, or their passwords.

Now imagine if you logged in to your Gmail account, and saw an email from your online bank with a two text-boxes where you could enter your user name and password, and a login button. Maybe there would be a headline saying: “You have received 10 000 dollars, please login to accept the payment”. Hmmmm…. Well, you’re smart, so you’d not trust that email. But believe it or not, there are many people who would give away their sensitive information easily, and fall victim to such phishing attempts. In this case, it would be Gmail’s fault which allowed having interactive web-elements such as text boxes, within the content of an email.

This is exactly why email providers won’t allow you to have any interactive elements inside emails, except one thing. The only interactive thing you can have within the content of an email is links! Well, links can be dangerous too; but without them, emails would be completely worthless. So Email providers have decided that for us, it’s much easier be more secure by scanning text and links inside an email to find suspicious attempts, than scanning complex interactive elements such as login forms and such.