Generate E-mail Surveys in Minutes

Designing a survey and sending out mailers to your target pool can be difficult and time consuming. E-mail Questionnaire lets you do this easily and quickly

Monday, January 01, 2007

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E-mail based questionnaires and surveys help a lot in gathering views of your target audience for better decision making. Tools that assist you to quickly create the questionnaire and send it across to your target audience can be of great help in such scenarios. E-mail Questionnaire by CompressWeb allows you to do these tasks while easily integrating with mail clients like Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora. This way you can quickly add recipients and send the questionnaire, all from a single interface. It does not require setting up any Web server for creating, sending and maintaining your questionnaire, and provides a library of questions for standard questionnaire scenarios such as Annual HR reviews, etc. Here's a sneak peek into how to use this tool.

Getting started
Download and install the software from the site mentioned. The options dialog opens automatically on first run. Expanding the Mail Settings node opens three nodes-one each for Outgoing Mail, Incoming Mail and Mail Add-ins. For the outgoing mail server, give the 'Sender E mail Address', and then choose from the options of 'Use Default Exchange Server Setting', or 'Use SMTP Server'. The first option auto-detects your Exchange Server settings. With the second option, you need to provide SMTP server name/ IP Address and other standard options such as port no (default is 25), user ID and password in case your SMTP server requires authentication.

The page with 'Incoming Mail' option contain a single option of enabling POP3 access. Check this option if your mail server allows POP3 access. If you enable this option, you also need to give the incoming mail server name/ IP Address, user ID and password. The Mail Add-in page contains three options for Add-ins. These are the mail clients that you want this software to work with. Choose the option according to the mail client you use.

Creating questionnaires
This is one place where the tool comes in handy. You don't need to sit down and frame questions most of the time as it comes with a library of questions which cover every aspect like e-commerce, education, HR, market, satisfaction and support. There's also a section for user defined Q&A. To set up a questionnaire, click on the Questionnaires View. Add questions on the page that appears on right hand side by right clicking on the page1 node in the questionnaire tree. Now choose Question option to manually edit one and mark properties such as whether the question is optional or compulsory.

Set up mail server configuration for the mail account to be used for sending out questionnaires

Manually edit questions or choose from the available library to complete the questionnaire page

Add Recipients for the questionnaire quickly by choosing addresses from your existing address book

Follow up on the mailed questionnaire using the report view that summarizes the replies for speedy reference and analyses

To use the existing library, click on the 'Questions Library' option after right clicking on the page node. Open the 'Send Mode' dialog through Form > Send menu option after you have filled in all the questions required. Click on the 'Recipients' link to open the recipients page on the dialog. The page provides buttons for choosing the data source for importing addresses. You can import from Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora and CSV files. We had chosen Outlook. This opens the Outlook contacts from where you can select the recipients. Click on Ok to complete; the tool starts sending the questionnaire straight away.

To follow up on the questionnaire, go to the Report view which displays the data in a report format indicating details such as number of replies to a particular option in the questionnaire, and percentage wise distribution of each reply.

The tool is very easy to use and provides all the options that one would need to create, send and follow up on the mail questionnaire, what more! You don't need to set up any server for all this. Your existing Exchange or POP3/SMTP server is enough. And if that is not enough, you can even set the start and end date and time for your questionnaire. A must have if you run into creating questionnaires for surveys quickly and can't manually track down replies.

It is not just the desktop based mail client, and exchange servers that the tool works with readily. It also supports Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. You can even use this for sending questionnaires from these mail ids as well. The tool comes in three versions, Standard, Professional, and Enterprise.

Enterprise edition allows you to add unlimited number of recipients to your surveys and provides more than thirty templates. Go for this version if you have many workloads related topsurveys- might help in providing some time off from this schedule!

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