Dear Joe-

I am trying to decide if it is best to post a survey to my current customers in Infusionsoft or survey monkey. I assumed it would be more effective in Iinfusionsoft but I have had feedback that is easier and faster on survey monkey. Can you or your customers weigh in on this for me?

Thanks so much-
Dawn Olds

Hello,

This is correct. Survey Monkey is easier but does not allow you track any data that I know into infusion. Maybe through the API you could send data, but not sure. I have used the infusion webforms to create surveys and have found even though it is a bit of work, it allows me the flexibility of tracking, tagging and initiating sequences based upon their responses. Hope this helps!

Good question and thanks for posting it here to the community.

I would strongly recommend using a service like Survey Monkey or Poll Daddy because they offer a consistent format and are relatively easy to setup. Afterward, you can export surveyed participants and add them to a specific Tag for later follow up (thank you, acknowledgment, etc.)

~Joe

I've survey extensively with both infusion and survey monkey.

In a nutshell, if you're doing the survey as a one off, do it with survey moneky and import the data, its quicker and easier

If you're created a survey which you'll use repeatedly over time, use infusion, its more hassle, but well worth it for the increased flexibility of what you can do with the data

Hope that helps

This post helps.

Thanks @danbradbury we're looking to have a survey for all our customers, long term, and building in Infusionsoft sounds like a bit more work, but worth it to use the data and be able to add users to sequences.

I believe there is a video tutorial, too.
http://media.infusionsoft.com/pm/fb/videos/bpractices/survey.swf

Bottom line, we want to track data and execute sequences automatically long term.

@JManna is you recommendation just on the ease of set up, or is there something else you are alluding to with doing surveys in Infusionsoft core functionality that may cause long term issues?


Cheers
Matt

Matt,

It depends. Most people want ease of use in deploying a survey, this is where SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy reign superior.

For a static, long-term survey, one could use Infusionsoft for it, and send results to people via Email based in different scores, a series of conditions. If a survey is in the marketing plan for your business, then totally, use Infusionsoft. I don't vision any problems doing it this way.

~Joe

we've just set up a couple of surveys, using web forms in infusion. However, it's used up all of our allocated fields. (seems there is a limit of 100 fields on info you can save for each person)

Has anyone encountered this? or are we doing something wrong!

Jon hit the issue right on. Custom Field limits.

If you plan to use a survey repeatedly or for a long time, creating custom fields for people's responses and using an Infusionsoft Form is a good way to go.

But if the survey is for a very targeted subset of your prospects, Survey Monkey is the better choice because it does not go towards your 100 custom field limit.

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Infusionsoft does have a built-in survey tool that was intended for our own internal use. You may have encountered a Customer Satisfaction or Beta Participation survey upon logging in to your application. These use the built-in survey tool.

It is not nearly as flexible as Survey Monkey, but it is also not shackled by the 100 custom field limit that Web Forms deal with, and it is able to fire off Action Sets based on people's choices.

If there is any interest in using it, I'd recommend heading on over to ideas.infusionsoft.com and asking that it be made available.

If your survey is multiple choice, I'd recommend using custom fields in it but then having conditions on those custom fields that convert them to tags.

This way you don't spend your 100 custom fields.

This way you can re-use your custom fields whenever you want since the data in them is always converted upon submission into tags.

The best practice is to setup custom fields called survey1, survey2, however many you need.

Then each form as you place it on your page has unique questions, which you write in your page even though the fields themselves have nothing to do with the questions. "which of these best describes you" is field "survey1"

Then when that's filled out, the form action creates tags based on their answers using conditions. Your condition would say: if custom field "survey1 starts with "business owner" then apply tag "Business Owner", if custom field "survey1 starts with "employee" then apply tag "employee" and so forth when using radio buttons.

You can use generic custom fields on many surveys at once too since as soon as the survey is submitted, it's all converted to tags, the next page could be another survey using the same 10 custom fields but this survey uses a different action set which converts the fields to tags based on a different set of conditions.

It's a lot to setup but it keeps your system clean and your custom fields free.