Post-Event Surveys are a way to gather feedback from your customers after an event has passed.
You can create a Form in Dotdigital to collect this feedback and then deliver it in your Post-Event Email.
Before starting, you should be familiar with:
Why set up a Post-Event Survey?
Post-Event surveys help you:
- Measure audience satisfaction using metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Understand how audiences felt about their experience to identify areas for improvement and gain insights for future planning
- Collect qualitative and quantitative feedback to guide programming and customer service improvements
- Gather audience demographic or behavioural data to improve future marketing and segmentation
REMINDER: Information that you collect in Dotdigital Forms is not automatically written into Spektrix. This means that you can only view the data you collect in Dotdigital.
How does it work?
You can choose to set up a standard Post-Event Survey to be used across all of your Events or create a different Survey for each type of Event you host. For example, you might have one Survey for outdoor Events and another for Events hosted inside your venue.
You can include a link to your Survey in your Post-Event Email and then the survey will automatically be delivered to customers after each Instance has passed. This means you won’t have to individually create a new Customer List and Dotdigital email every time you want to send out a survey.
Optionally, you can also choose to automatically collect some data which is already linked to the customer in Spektrix, without having to ask the customer to type it in. For example, the name of the Event they had tickets for. This means that when a customer clicks the link in your email, the form can automatically record which event they attended.
In Dotdigital, you can view the responses to reports and use visualisations to interpret the data. You can also export responses to up to five questions at a time into a CSV or have each customer's response automatically emailed to you.
TIP: You can compare your feedback across different Events more easily by using a standardised survey.
1. Plan your Survey
Before you start building your Post-Event Survey, consider the following points.
- What is your goal for the Survey?
- What insights do you want to collect and how will you use them? Think about what information you don’t already collect in Spektrix.
- What questions do you want to include? Keep your questions concise and relevant to reduce drop off. Remember that you can only export 5 headings at a time in your CSV.
- How will you process the data and take any feedback you receive into action?
TIP: Avoid making your survey too long. A short, focused form usually gets higher response rates.
2. Create your Post-Event Survey Form
To learn how to set up a Form, you can follow the steps in our article Surveys, Forms and Pages in Dotdigital.
Additionally, when setting up a Form for a Post-Event Survey, you can choose to automatically collect data which is already linked to the customer in Spektrix. To do this, you will need to use a hidden value block in your Dotdigital Form which uses Data Fields.
How to add a hidden value block
When building your Form, follow the steps below to add a hidden value block.
-
In the Form editor, drag and drop the Hidden value block
from the Form blocks menu into the body of your Form.
You
can drop the hidden value anywhere in your Form; it will not display
any
content.
- Click the Assign to a data field dropdown.
-
Select the data field you want to assign a
query string key
to. For example, EVENTNAME.
-
Enter a reference for this field in the Query string key
box. For example, Event.
-
Create as many hidden value blocks as you need. Your blocks will appear
in
the Form editor with the query string key:
You can use any of the available Data Fields to automatically collect data about your customers. For example, you could collect whether or not they have a Tag or a certain Membership.
WARNING: Do not use any identifiable customer data in your hidden value. Do not use the customer name fields, email address or any type of ID.
3. Link the Form to your Post-Event Email
To send out your Form, you will need to edit the unsent Email Campaign(s) in Dotdigital which are linked to your Post Event Email(s).
You can use a Button content block or add a Link to a text block to include a link to your Form.
If you also want to optionally use the hidden value to collect data, you will need to create a URL which references the query string key(s) you created in the previous step.
How to create your URL
To generate the link to your Form:
-
Click PUBLISH or PUBLISHED PAGE.
TIP: Make sure to re-publish your Form if you have made changes.
-
Click the COPY LINK button:
- Add the Data Field to the URL by adding ?Key=@DATAFIELD@ For example, if your Data Field is EVENTNAME and your query string key is Event, your URL would be: www.yourdotdigtialformlink.com?Event=@EVENTNAME@
- To add another, follow the same format. For example, if you also want to add the Data Field EVENTTIME and your query string key is Date, your URL would be: www.yourdotdigtialformlink.com?event=@EVENTNAME@&date=@EVENTDATESHORT@
Tags and Attributes
If you are using Tags or Attributes in your hidden values, you can follow the same format for your URL.
For example, if you also want to add the Data Field GOLDMEMBER and your query string key is GoldMember, your URL would be:
www.yourdotdigtialformlink.com?event=@EVENTNAME@&date=@EVENTDATESHORT@&goldmember=@GOLDMEMBER@
4. Test your Link
To test that your Form is working:
- Make sure the send rule is set to deliver the Post-Event Email one day after the Instance.
- Set up a hidden test event which falls into your Post-Event Email Send Rule. For example, set up a test Instance with a date of today.
- Purchase a ticket for yourself so you can receive the email.
- The following day, you should receive the email. Click the link to the survey in the email and complete the Form.
5. Filter your CSV
Once your survey is live, you can export your responses as a CSV and filter by any of the hidden values you have included.
- View results directly in Dotdigital under Analytics > Reports, expand the MORE REPORTS dropdown and then select Surveys, pages, and forms.
- Choose your Form and then navigate to the Responses tab.
- You should see the hidden values alongside your other Form questions.
Further Reading
To continue learning about communicating with your customers, take a look at the following articles:
- Surveys, Forms and Pages in Dotdigital
- Pre- and Post-Event Emails
- Introduction to Dotdigital Programs