<1/> Open survey distribution

Open survey distribution boosts the organic reach of your surveys.
 
A survey is shared with anybody through one identical URL link, which is universal, public, and therefore anonymous. In the Nfield Online survey system, you copy the URL of the survey and paste it as a link directly into the email you send out.
 
The simplicity and uniformity of this link allows you to:

• encourage recipients to invite friends and colleagues to participate in the survey, simply by sharing the original email invitation
• distribute the survey through channels other than email. Typically via social media and websites

However, these two opportunities also mean you lose the control of the survey’s distribution. You can’t send out a reminder because you don’t know all the recipients it’s reached, or who has already completed the survey. The absence of tracking has one other major implication: a recipient can do the survey more than once.
 
Please note that the open distribution method is best used for surveys with a limited email list.

<2/> Closed survey distribution

Closed survey distribution gives you more control.
 
A survey is shared though a set of URL links only with known recipients. Each URL link has a different unique ending which corresponds to a different individual recipient invited to take the same survey. In professional market research, these unique endings are known as respondent keys.
 
This system of unique links enables you to monitor the survey activity of every recipient. This means you also know what is happening throughout the entire recipient pool, so you can send out appropriate reminders at every stage to those who:

• haven’t opened the survey invitation
• opened the invitation but haven’t started doing the survey
• started doing the survey, but haven’t completed it

Nfield Online prevents recipients from responding more than once to the same survey’s questions. In the case of recipients who started but did not yet complete the survey, it also enables you to send them a reminder which takes them directly to the point where they stopped. All this results in clean and more credible survey data.
 
Because of these specifics, closed surveys cannot be distributed through any other channel. You always need an email list that is big enough to satisfy the survey’s requirements. In many cases, the company’s customer database is perfectly sufficient. But when it isn’t, the solution for professional market researchers is to use the services of sample providers.

Don’t miss: Email reputation

Even when you use Nfield Online to send your survey invitations to a contact list, it doesn’t necessarily mean all your invitations will arrive in their intended inboxes. As with any other marketing and sales emailing activity, the distribution of surveys through email is inspected under a set of rules known as email reputation. These rules decide whether the email is successfully delivered to inboxes, diverted into spam folders or blocked.
 
Email reputation directly affects the success of your online research, so make sure you find out everything you need to know in our two articles:

• Why email reputation matters to market researchers 
• How to build a good email reputation