You can create an Email survey in Survicate and send it directly from our tool, without using your own CRM or email tool. This article walks you through the whole process, from creating the survey to analyzing the results.
Before you start
To send email surveys from Survicate, you need:
An eligible plan. This feature is available on current paid plans and isn’t available on legacy plans. See Sending limits on your subscription plan for details.
A verified sending domain. Your IT admin or engineer adds a few DNS records once. Ask them early: the setup takes only a few minutes, but DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to go live. Read more on domain verification here.
A CSV file with your recipients’ email addresses. Here you can find instructions for uploading the audience list.
Step 1. Create a new Email survey
Click +Create new survey and choose how you want to start.
Select Email or shareable link and click Continue.
Select Send an email directly from Survicate and click Continue.
Add questions
In the Create tab, under Questions, add your own questions or pick them from the library.
📌 To show the first question directly in the email, start your survey with one of these:
a welcome message
a single choice question
a smiley scale
a rating scale
a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) question
If you choose any other question type as the first one, the email with the survey will include a Start the survey button (with the survey link) instead of showing the first question.
Read more about creating an Email or Shareable link survey here.
Design the survey and the email
1. In Create ➡️ Theme, choose how the survey looks when respondents open it in their browser.
2. In Create ➡️ Email, design the survey email. You can choose whether to embed the first question or include only the survey link.
On the right-hand side of the email designer, you can see a preview of how the email will look.
💡 Personalize the email by including respondent attributes in your email's text. To do so, click to edit the Email body text:
Here, type @ in the email box and choose an attribute from the list:
Optionally, after adding an attribute, click it to add a fallback value.
You can recall only attributes you’ve uploaded as part of an Audience to an Email survey in this workspace. If you don’t see any yet, come back after you add an Audience.
3. In Settings, Texts, and Translations, set up everything as you like. See here for more details on what is possible.
💡 In Translations, switch between the Questions, Messages, and Email tabs to adjust all parts of the survey's landing page view and email view:
❗️ For the survey to be translated for your respondents, you need to include a Language column with the recipients' language codes in the CSV file that you will upload to the Audience of the survey (in the next steps).
Otherwise, the email will be sent in the default language.
If your survey isn't translated into a person's browser language, they'll see the original version of the survey you created.
If you make changes to the survey questions or answer options after adding Translations, they won't be updated automatically. You'd need to manually update all the added Translations.
Step 2. Add your survey's Audience
In the Audience tab, you can upload the list of contacts who receive your survey email.
1. Go to the survey's Audience tab:
2. Click on + Add audience.
3. Upload a CSV file from your device. The file:
can contain up to 10,000 rows and 100 columns,
should be no larger than 20MB,
It should include the email addresses of respondents in the column named "user_id" or "email" (❗️ if the file has email addresses in the “email” column, it must also have a "user_id" column with some other identifiers❗️)
💡 Download the sample CSV file to see how your spreadsheet should look.
Any columns other than the email address appear in your survey analysis as respondent attributes, and you can use them to filter results.
4. After adding your file, add the Audience name and click on Create audience.
💡The created Audience allows you to remove some of the users, if needed:
5. Remember to enable the chosen audience:
You can enable several Audiences at once. The survey goes to everyone in them.
Step 3. (Optional) Connect integrations to your survey
In the Connect tab of your survey, you can enable and connect any tool you use to send the responses collected to the apps you're using.
Our native integrations enable you to follow up with specific respondents in your CRM, analyze data in your analytics tools, open tickets with your support team after an unhappy customer leaves feedback, and much more!
Step 4. Verify your sending domain
You need a verified sending domain to send email surveys from Survicate. Once your domain is verified, you can send from any address on it (for example, surveys@yourcompany.com).
The setup takes only a few minutes, but DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to go live, so ask your IT admin early.
💡 Why the DNS setup? Verifying your domain proves to Gmail, Outlook, and other inboxes that surveys really come from you. This improves deliverability, meets the DMARC checks that providers increasingly require, and lets you send from any address on that domain without verifying each one separately.
Add your domain in Survicate. Go to Send ➡️ Domain settings and enter the domain you want to send from (for example, yourcompany.com or a subdomain like surveys.yourcompany.com).
Copy the generated DNS records. Survicate creates 3 required DKIM records (CNAME) and 1 optional DMARC record, each with a Name and Value. It's okay to skip the DMARC record, but we recommend adding it if your domain doesn't already have one. Please flag this for your engineer so they don't create a duplicate.
Send those records to the person who manages your domain. Typically, an IT admin or engineer with access to your DNS provider (for example, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, or Route 53). Ask them to add each record exactly as shown.
Ask them to confirm, then verify in Survicate. DNS changes can take a few minutes up to 48 hours to go live. Once your engineer confirms the records are added, click Verify DNS. Each record shows as Verified once it's live and correctly detected. Once all required records are verified, your domain is ready to send.
Step 5. Send your survey
Here is an overview of the Send tab and all the settings available there.
1. Send - review the To, From, Reply-to, and Subject fields.
Send a test email to yourself to make sure everything looks as expected.
Send or schedule the campaign with the survey.
2. History - see all historical campaigns of the survey, as well as campaign statuses, or main metrics. Campaign statuses include:
Draft - campaign is being created or already created, but has not been sent or scheduled yet.
Sending - campaign is in the process of sending emails to the audience.
Scheduled - the campaign is scheduled to be sent on a specific date and time.
Sent - emails have already been sent to all the contacts from the audience.
Stopped - campaign was in progress (in Sending), but it was stopped before sending emails to all the contacts was finished. You can resume sending or cancel the campaign if it’s no longer relevant.
Canceled - the campaign was canceled after it was stopped.
From History, go to the campaign analysis, delete the campaign, or take other actions depending on its status.
3. Email settings - set up or edit the Sender's email, Sender's name, and Reply-to email fields.
4. Link settings - add merge tags to the survey link to better filter results after your survey has been sent in more than one campaign:
The values of those tags will be static for the campaign (for example, UTM tags); they will not change for every respondent.
If you'd like to see user attributes in the survey analysis, please add them in the CSV audience file as additional columns.
5. Domain - see step 6 for instructions.
6. Retaking - choose if the same respondent can take this survey multiple times, or survey multiple respondents on the same device (each response will have a different respondent ID, useful when displaying the survey on a device where many people can leave feedback).
7. Response limits - set a total or periodical response limit for your survey to automatically stop the survey when it's reached.
When the periodical Limit of responses within a period is reached, the survey will change its status to Paused with an indication of when it will be reactivated.
💡 Limits of responses within a period are counted on a calendar basis - calendar day, week, month, year. Those limits are counted according to the GMT timezone - for instance, if your survey has a limit of 10 responses per day, it means that it can collect 10 responses from 00:00:00 GMT until 23:59:59 GMT each day.
If you would like to reactivate the survey before the period passes, you need to increase the Limit of responses within a period and enable the survey after that. If you don't enable a survey, it will not be activated automatically when the Limit of responses within a period is increased; you need to enable it yourself.
8. Link expiration - set how long respondents have to answer after the email is sent.
9. Start/End - set a cut-off date on which the survey will close automatically and stop accepting responses. We will stop your survey on the selected day at 00:00:00 GMT.
Step 6. Analyze the results
Once the email goes out, all responses (complete and partial) appear in the Analyze tab. There, you can:
view Overall results, a summary of all responses
review Individual responses from each respondent
check Email results: see who clicked the survey button or the first question in the email, who unsubscribed, and more. You can export each list.
See How to analyze survey results for an explanation of each metric in the Analyze tab.
📌 In Settings ➡️ Suppressions, you’ll find everyone who hard-bounced, reported your email as spam, or unsubscribed from one of your email surveys.
💡 Suppressions apply to the whole workspace. Suppressed contacts are excluded from all future sends in the workspace.
Sending limits on your subscription plan
📌 Sending email surveys directly from Survicate is not available on legacy plans. If you’re on a legacy plan (one no longer listed on our pricing page), you can still send Email surveys through your own email tool or CRM, or share a survey link. To use this feature, switch to one of our current plans. Contact our team to find the best option for you.
Monthly send allowance
Each current paid plan includes an email sending allowance:
Starter and Growth plans: 500 to 7,500 sends per month, depending on your response limit. You get 5 times your response limit. For example, the Starter 100 plan lets you send the survey to 500 contacts a month.
Pro and Enterprise plans: 50,000 sends per year. Custom limits are available, so talk with us to learn more.
Your allowance resets on the same schedule as your response limit (monthly or yearly, depending on your plan).
Daily send allowance
You can send up to 10,000 emails per day, as long as your plan’s allowance covers it. For larger campaigns, contact us at support@survicate.com.
What counts as a "send"
Each email sent counts as one send, regardless of whether it goes to a new or repeat recipient. If the same person receives a survey twice, that's two sends.
Need more? If you need additional sends beyond your plan's allowance, contact us for a custom quote.
📞 If you have any questions about sending a survey from Survicate - feel free to reach out to our team via chat or email: support@survicate.com.
Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS - related emoticons are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.