In an age where off-the-shelf online survey (CAWI) solutions mean, in theory, that any company can conduct online market research in-house, professional market research companies have to offer a notably superior service in order to win business.

The specific knowledge and expertise possessed by dedicated market research professionals is, of course, a primary sales point. But making the most of that expertise calls for the right technical online questionnaire tools. It means working with an online survey platform which aids every aspect of the market researcher’s craft, from device-aware survey design to fast response processing, while making optimal use of online technology.

Professional online survey necessities

There are a number of basics that every professional online market research survey solution should provide. Here at NIPO, however, we don’t settle for the basics. Having spent over 20 years working closely alongside market research organizations to establish the industry’s needs and explore its desires and possibilities, this is how we deliver Nfield Online market research surveys.

Investing in a new solution. Is it worth it?

Switching to a new, unfamiliar survey solution may feel daunting, but the rewards are well worth the investment. In the same way as we are acutely aware of market researchers’ needs, here at NIPO we appreciate the challenges that upgrading to a new solution might present.

For a start, you’ll want to see how Nfield Online performs for your specific needs, so you can tangibly evaluate its benefits over your current solution. No problem. We can work with you to set up custom demonstration projects.

You’re probably also wondering how your people are going to learn the new skillsets and ways of working they’ll need to take advantage of Nfield Online’s numerous capabilities. We’ve thought of that too. We can arrange all the training that’s necessary to get everybody up to speed, including when new people come on board, and even provide scripting services if that’s not one of your in-house skills.

Whatever your question might be, we’ll be happy to answer. So you can take your first steps to having a more user and respondent-friendly, secure, scalable and versatile solution that means you can always say “yes!” to even the most challenging of customer requests.

Customer satisfaction surveys, made immediately after purchase, account for 8% of all market research spending ^[1] and are the 4th most commonly conducted type of survey in the market research industry.

Much more than a way of keeping tabs on the customer experience, customer satisfaction surveys are an invaluable tool in the quest for customer retention and loyalty, as well as an aid for capitalizing on happy customers’ positivity. Taking appropriate action on the results can have a very tangible impact on future sales. Especially when it is applied to customers at extreme ends of the spectrum:

• Dissatisfied customers: 33% of Americans say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service ^[2]. Averting this requires immediate action. If survey feedback from dissatisfied customers is automatically shared with the relevant key account manager (or post-sales customer care department), they can take appropriate immediate action to prevent the customer from switching to a competitor.
• Highly satisfied customers: Americans are more likely to post about good experiences (53%) than poor experiences (35%) on social media ^[3]. If you know who’s thinking of you positively and more likely to recommend your business to others, you have an opportunity to target them with appropriate future campaigns that make the most of this.

Capturing and capitalizing on the moment

Acting fast
Obtaining insights into a customer’s purchasing experience, and feeding ‘urgent action cases’ back to customer service, needs to be done as quickly as possible after the purchase. Both for capturing the customer’s raw emotive feelings and to enable appropriate action to be taken within the most impactful timeframe.

Communication choice
Different customers prefer different methods of communication. Some are happy to respond online after contact via SMS / text or email. Others are more comfortable with speaking on the phone. And some prefer face-to-face interview.

In the case of negative experiences, such as payment disputes or complaints, which can become complex to resolve, customer preference is likely to sway more towards talking to a human on the phone (40%) or face-to-face interaction (23%) ^[4].

Nfield puts customer satisfaction first

Over 20 years of working closely alongside market research companies all over the world has given us deep insight into this industry’s complex needs. We’ve made it our business to turn this into solutions which truly help market research professionals do their jobs better and deliver more satisfying results.

When it comes to customer satisfaction surveys, we’ve thought right through the process so everybody gets what they need.

Multi-channel flexibility
Availability of Nfield Online, CAPI, and CATI, with the ability to switch between them and synchronize results, means all respondent contact preferences can be met via a single integrated system.

Direct feedback
Any defined ‘trigger responses’ from the survey can automatically be forwarded to specified individuals on the end-client side. This automation means action-requiring alerts go immediately and directly to those who need to know.

External integration
Using the API, Nfield solutions can easily be integrated with external applications such as CRM systems for automatic loading of respondent profiles into surveys. And integration with social media enables fast, automated and holistic capture of customer feedback.

Appealing to use
The stunning, responsive, mobile first design provided via Nfield Online encourages respondents to complete surveys and voice their (dis)satisfaction more easily. After all, there is nothing more frustrating to an already frustrated customer than a satisfaction survey that’s an effort to navigate through, especially on a mobile device! With Nfield, that doesn’t have to happen.

Every requirement met

Nfield’s broad and highly customizable capabilities mean no demand, requirement or scenario is out of reach. No matter how niche, how large or how complex it may be. We are proud to bring you the future of customer satisfaction surveys!

Feel free to contact us to find out more about what we can do for you.

[1] Global Market Research 2018 – An ESOMAR study
[2] American Express 2017 Customer Service Barometer
[3] American Express 2017 Customer Service Barometer
[4] Live Chat Benchmark Report 2017

Since 23 April 2019, users of Nfield have been able to benefit from integration of Power BI for generating shareable Fieldwork Overview reports.

Fieldwork Overview reports

These standard reports enable you to monitor your Nfield Online and CAPI projects and easily share results with relevant parties. They can be found in the Reports section of every Nfield survey.

The new Power BI Fieldwork Overview report provides:

• An overview of the numbers of completes, drop outs and screen outs, per survey including their progress through the day.
• The median survey time and distribution across the respondents.
• Question-by-question statistics for how often each has been answered, so you can easily identify if any of them coincide with big drop offs.
• A cross tabulation page where you can compare survey questions against specific samples or questionnaire fields.
• A page where you can see all verbatim, per question.
• The ability to share the report with any stakeholder (e.g. customer or colleague) via a temporary link, without them needing access to Nfield.

Custom reports

Nfield has been developed to produce data in a format that makes it easy to generate state-of-the-art reports via Business Intelligence tools. This means that, in addition to making use of the standard Power BI Fieldwork Overview report, you can create your own custom reports using either Power BI or alternative BI tools, without the need for additional data processing.

Here at NIPO, we’re very excited about the opportunities Microsoft Power BI presents for the market research industry and see huge potential in how it can benefit our customers. Via both standard and custom reports. Although we are not yet at the stage where Power BI can completely replace your own data processing, it can already assist you in effectively monitoring and steering your fieldwork and creating custom dashboards, with very little investment. The ability to easy share reports with any relevant stakeholders, as needed, eliminates the time-consuming task of arranging access to fieldwork progress while also boosting transparency.

About Microsoft Power BI: Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your organization. It connects to hundreds of data sources, simplifies data prep, and drives ad hoc analysis. https://powerbi.microsoft.com

2019 spring hackathon at NIPO! 11 teams in Amsterdam and Madrid working on projects like office climate control, geo localization, face recognition, pixel art, and much more. See the video to get an impression of the day.

If you want to conduct an online survey that refers to frequently changing information, or needs to extract relevant information from a large database, you’ll need to connect your survey to an external source via an API. This is easily achievable with Nfield Online.

There is a wide range of scenarios which might call for this. To give just a few examples, you might want to show:

• Today’s TV programs
• A product list filtered by previously selected answers
• Respondent information from your CRM
• The respondent’s latest purchase history

Or you might need to utilize real-time information to route your survey according to current stock status.

How to connect to your external source

The connection to your external source consists of one or two components:

1. A URL (always necessary) and
2. Parameters (optional)

To illustrate how it works, let’s take a look at the Cryptocurrency demo we’ve set up. This demo survey connects to https://cex.io/api/tickers/USD/EUR to retrieve the latest cryptocurrency prices. As you can see, this URL takes you some JSON code. Copying this code into a JSON editor will present it as shown in the illustration below. Note that Nfield will only load the content from the “data” section and will ignore other information.

Step 1 is therefore to identify the URL to connect to your survey. However, every survey has its own unique requirements and ready-made API URLs are rarely available. Your IT team will actually need to create the URL(s) that return the relevant JSON format data results. Of course, NIPO can provide any support you need for doing this.

Step 2 is to set this up in Nfield Online. Under Survey Default Settings, simply add the URL as an API end point and give it a name. Doing this tells Nfield that calling “CryptoCurrency” from the survey script refers to a call to this particular URL.

Step 3 is to call the API from your survey setup.

The call status is stored in “result” and the answers are stored in the arrays of var1 and var2. In our example var1 is filled with the ‘pair’ info and var2 with ‘ask’ (asking price) information, so our *GETDATA command looks like this:

*GETDATA result pair,ask "CryptoCurrency:"

Note that our demo example doesn’t utilize the second component option for parameters.

Always here to help

We hope this article inspires you to explore the possibilities opened up by the use of API endpoints. If you have any questions or require any assistance, please feel free to contact us.

With GDPR coming into effect in May 2018, which protects and expands the privacy rights of EU citizens, it’s clear, that now more than ever, all market research professionals have to pay close attention to the protection of both their own personal and business customer data. With that in mind, we have revised all our privacy and terms of use policies, which are now readily available on our website. If you are a user of our systems or you are thinking about becoming one, surely don’t miss reading these documents.

Are you a customer or a visitor?

In our effort to make these policies as transparent and simple as possible for you, we have divided them into various groups:

(1) If you are our customer, we encourage you to read these documents:
Customer privacy policy

When employing Nfield:
Nfield acceptable use
Nfield terms of use and conditions

When visiting our website:
Website privacy policy
Nipo.com cookie disclosure

(2) If you are a visitor to our website, but not a customer, please pay attention to these documents:
Website privacy policy
Nipo.com cookie disclosure

Customers and visitors: remember your data privacy rights

We believe that it’s important for you to know your privacy rights, so here they are:

Under various data protection laws, you have the right to access and rectify your personal information. You also have the right to delete your personal information from our systems, unless we have a legitimate reason for holding it.

Especially, if you find yourself in one of the following situations:

• you do not want your personal data to be used in a manner described in our “Customer privacy policy” or “Website privacy policy”;
• you want to see the personal data we hold about you;
• you want to withdraw your consent for the use of your data;
• you want to change or delete inaccurate, incomplete, or irrelevant data;
• you want to contact our Data Protection Officer,

then please notify us by email to info@nipo.com. We request objections to be clear and specific and to provide us with detailed information on how we should handle and alter your data.

You are welcome to contact our team at the same email address info@nipo.com with any questions and concerns regarding our policies and terms of use. If you are a customer, you can also contact your NIPO representative directly.

Customers: learn more about the security of our survey solutions

Market researchers all around the world utilize our Online, CAPI and CATI survey software solutions to gain valuable insights into the minds of consumers. This places our software solutions right at the heart of the market research business, and nobody –  whether it’s us, a survey software provider, or you, a market research professional, can afford to let that be compromised.

We have always aimed to build survey software solutions that are secure by design. Which is why we have been the world’s first survey software provider certified to ISO 27001-2013 standards since 2015. Our data security systems are outlined in the “NIPO’s data security” article. We encourage you to learn more about them as you play a crucial part in maintaining the bulletproof security of our survey software solutions.

Data privacy and protection have always been paramount to us. We hope you will support us on this journey.

In an exciting development for researchers who survey respondents in China, NIPO is proud to announce the release of a new Nfield deployment from Chinese mainland. This makes Nfield the only international market research platform approved as an Internet Content Provider (ICP) by the Chinese authorities. Researchers and respondents alike can now enjoy a uniquely superior experience with Nfield, as data no longer needs to pass through the Great Firewall of China.

Why Chinese mainland deployment matters: The performance of outbound internet traffic in China is impacted by what is known as the Great Firewall of China. This firewall actively checks all connections to the outside world, including cloud-based online interviewing platforms. For Nfield Online users in Chinese mainland connected to the Nfield deployment in the Azure data center in Hong Kong SAR, this previously meant unpredictable delays in load times for new questions and thus a poor respondent experience, with high drop-outs as a result. This was not only the case for NIPO’s Nfield, but for all CAWI interview systems hosted from outside Chinese mainland.

The new Nfield China deployment has both its primary and backup locations hosted in Chinese mainland. This has been made possible through the Chinese Government’s full approval of the deployment and granting of an Internet Content Provider (ICP) filing. This gives Nfield a unique status within the international market research industry and enables us to provide an unrivalled level of service.

As well as the obvious benefits for online surveys, the China deployment also means improved interface responsiveness when setting up survey projects and managing fieldwork. And Nfield CAPI interviewers will benefit from faster synchronization with tablets.

Final stress tests were carried out in January 2019 with a group of pilot users. Following the successful completion of those first projects, the domain is now available for use and we are delighted to have already welcomed our first new customers on board. Existing customers operating in China will be invited to switch to the local deployment.

The Nfield China deployment is running the latest Nfield version and will remain in sync with updates applied to other regions.

Integrating Nfield Online with panel providers is simple and easy via common market research industry practices. When you have sample information from a sample source (your own panel database, or sample database from your panel provider or client), Nfield can facilitate the sharing of this information and the interview status between Nfield and the source(s) concerned. The following Q&A has been compiled to help you understand how it’s done.

What are the benefits of integration?

Integration automates the sharing of information between sample sources and Nfield. It keeps both systems up-to-date in real time, without human intervention. The following examples illustrate how this is of benefit to all involved.

1. The panel provider (anyone providing the sample source) can pass sample information (e.g. respondent name / product used) to Nfield. The sample information can be used directly in the questionnaire.
2. When an interview is paused / ended / completed, Nfield updates the panel provider on the survey status via a result code. For example, it might be reported as successful, screen-out, quota full or another custom exit code of your choice. The panel provider can follow up by sending a thank-you message, adding credits or sending a reminder to the panel member.
3. Because the panel provider receives status updates (as described in the previous item), they have a clear overview of how the fieldwork is progressing and can be proactive in taking any necessary action, such as adding a new sample to the survey.

Who should distribute the invitation and what’s the best way to do it?

That’s entirely up to you and how creative you want to be (see Creative Online Survey Distribution). Nfield has an email management module for managing, sending and tracking email templates. To find out which options are available to you, please check with your own organization and your panel providers. They probably have their own member portal or app to facilitate management of invitations and rewards. 

Should I upload sample information to Nfield?

This depends on your needs. 

Nfield provides a sample management module to facilitate your fieldwork operation. You can upload / download sample information in Microsoft Excel format or using our API (see API – What you need to know). You can modify or delete information as necessary. To comply with GDPR, you can also partially clear confidential information and/or delete interview data (see GDPR and Nfield Toolkit).

How can I link a sample to both systems?

Nfield allows you to define your own RespondentKey for each sample. So you can use an ID provided by your panel provider (such as SampleID or PanelMemberID) as the RespondentKey.
 
When you upload the sample information to Nfield, simply include this RespondentKey as a field in the Excel sheet. Note that there is no requirement to upload sample information if you don’t want to. The panel provider can also distribute the invitation link directly themselves using the following format: 

I would like to show the respondent name and purchased product in the questionnaire text. How can this be done?

There are two options for this. You can either upload these details to Nfield or incorporate the information in the survey URL.

If you choose to upload the information to Nfield, simply incorporate the RespondentKey in your invitation link to make it appear within the questionnaire. 

Or if you prefer, you can incorporate the sample information directly in the survey URL, as shown below, to get the same result. 

Can I encrypt the sample information in the survey URL?

Yes. This can be done using an encryption key which is provided in each survey. Please contact our helpdesk for details on how to implement this. The resulting URL will be presented as shown below:

How does my panel provider get updated on the interview status so they can give rewards as needed?

When an interview is completed, the redirection URL can be configured to a page published by your panel provider or to one of your own, which can be defined according to the result code in each case. You can include whatever parameters you choose in this result code (e.g. RespondentKey, additional products, duration spent). The panel provider should process these codes to update their database so rewards can be given accordingly. 

How can my panel provider stay up-to-date on the quota status?

Nfield constantly checks the quota status while interviews are being carried out. If you have access to Nfield, you can get a quick overview of the current status via Nfield manager. Third parties (e.g. your panel provider/client) have the following options for keeping up-to-date.

1. The panel provider/client keeps their own record of the number of successful interviews in each quota cell.
2. Supervisors using Nfield report the quota status to them (manually).
3. API automation is created to retrieve the latest quota status and share it with the panel provider.

Note that we are currently developing functionality for direct sharing of quota status with panel providers. Please check in with us on how this work is progressing!

Can I include multiple panel providers in one study?

Yes, with some modification to the questionnaire. Contact our helpdesk for details. 

More questions about panel integration?

We know that every customer has different needs. If your questions / requirements aren’t covered in this article, contact us and we’ll be delighted to provide answers. 

On 3 October 2018 Microsoft and NIPO organized a Cyber Security War Game at NIPO offices in Amsterdam. A very interesting day that helped us understand a lot on the techniques used by hackers and made us gain insights in the power of cloud platforms in helping you defend against both internal and external threats.

The event

So, on Wednesday 3 October NIPO staff was up for this battle. Manas Bhardwaj and Rob van Abeelen from Microsoft came over to lead the game. NIPO staff was divided in a red and blue team. One team was attacking, the other defending an application.

The aim of the cyber war game was to:

• Understand some of the techniques used by attackers to steal data.
• Understand the range of cyber security theft risks for custom developed software.
• Understand the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) 10 most critical web application security risks) and available mitigations.
• Understand the importance of a robust cyber security incident response plan.
• Work more cohesively as a team in the event of a cyber security incident.
• Gain insights into the power of cloud platforms in helping you defend against both internal and external threat actors.

Feedback gathered after the game

Playing the game was a very fun and sometimes (intentional) stressful exercise. Our NIPO colleagues looked back on the event as a good exercise to make you more aware of security, as it brought many security aspects to the forefront. It was a good learning environment, to see how systems can be vulnerable. It was fun and a very close to a real event.

Learnings from the Cyber Security War Game

Apart from a solid confirmation that our efforts to collectively maintain security standards at the highest levels is nothing less than a necessity for a cloud Saas provider, we found these valuable learnings:

• The attackers’ progress had several milestones, and the main breakthrough every time came from having a user account/password. We know how important it is to be careful with your credentials, but being confronted with how big a difference having access to one’s user account is, was impressive.
• We gained insight in (and access to) the tools that hackers use. It is shocking to see how easy it is to use them and the information that you can get if a website has a security issue.
• We learned we cannot only rely on tools (like Veracode) to catch all security issues when developing.
• Events like these clearly show the things you must think when looking at vulnerabilities in code and the competencies of the teams.
• Run exercises like these more often on our own system with a wide group of people. You cannot rely on a few colleagues when dealing with security threats. If they are sick/out, that can be a problem.

In conclusion, it was a very useful experience with positive feedback from our colleagues. We aim to repeat this session at our Madrid office soon.

Do you read all your text messages? It seems you probably do! According to Esendex Research, in 2018 SMS messages have a 94% global average open rate. What’s more, 82% of messages are read within 5 minutes of receipt.

At NIPO, we believe SMS is a great channel for distributing invitations for online surveys. So we’re taking this opportunity to explain why, guide you through setting it up with Nfield Online and provide useful tips for making the most of it. 

Why SMS is a great channel for online survey invitations

Distributing online survey invitations via text means you can reach a wider audience, really fast. Plus your messages stand out and get attention. What’s not to like?

1. SMS reaches a phenomenally wide audience. In 2018, 5 out of 7.6 billion global population have the ability to send and receive text messages via SMS.
2. SMS messages get more attention than emails. SMS messages have a 94% global average open rate, but only 1 in 4 emails people receive are opened (not surprising when so many emails get directed to the spam folder). Sure, sending invitations via SMS comes at a cost, but the considerably higher effectiveness is well worth the investment. Especially if you are trying to reach a difficult target group. SMS lifts your message out of the daily deluge of (spam) emails.
3. Faster response rates. 82% of text messages are read within 5 minutes People usually give more priority to opening text messages as they are perceived as a time-dependent matter. This gives market research companies great opportunities for capturing in-the-moment responses. For example, you could send an SMS survey invitation to your panel members immediately after their team has won a trophy to capture the emotion of the moment. Or to a retail brand club member immediately after they’ve made a purchase.

SMS is a faster way to reach respondents at key moments, with a higher chance of getting noticed and triggering action.

Setting up SMS invitations with Nfield

The first thing you need to do is find out who your SMS gateway providers are. This is easily done via a Google search for “SMS gateway providers”.

What should you look for in an SMS gateway provider? That depends on the level of technical integration you want. This can be broken down into three levels:

• Basic option – ability to send text messages to mobile numbers.
• Better option – ability to upload your contacts to a portal where you can set up your SMS template according to your preference.
• Advanced option – ability to use their API for integration with your own workflows.

Email to SMS

This is the easiest way to implement text messaging with Nfield Online. The illustration below shows how you can manually create an email to a specific address. If you want to send multiple emails at once, just use mail merge. Your SMS gateway provider will tell you how to construct the email address, which usually comprises a combination of the recipient’s telephone number and the provider’s email domain. Then all you have to do is compose your SMS content and hit send.

Using the tools from your MS gateway provider

To show you how this works, we’re using TextMagic’s solution as an example. The first thing you need to do is set up your contact list in a contact group by uploading an Excel file. Then compose your email and use the relevant Excel field (e.g. First name) for personalization. TextMagic also lets you configure the sender name to be your company/client name and schedule a distribution time.

Making it a success

We talked about the technical side, now let’s give you some recommendations to make your SMS campaign a success.

Content

• Remember to keep your message short! Think about how an SMS looks when you open it on your phone.
• Shorten your URL. See this post about how to batch send unique links
• Set up a sender ID which shows your brand name instead of a telephone number. The cost is worth the instant recognition it will generate.

Timing

• The best time is to send your SMS invitation is ‘in-the-moment’ (e.g. very soon after the recipient has visited a store / taken a flight / used a service / had another form of communication with the brand or organization).
• Beware of certain parts of the day when your text message is less likely to get the attention you want it to have. For example, avoid sending messages late in the evening, during rush hour and preferably not on Mondays.
• Don’t forget to consider the time-zone your respondents are in!

Get permission

• A mobile number is considered as a more private asset than an email address. Using it can be regarded as intrusive if the recipient has not specifically opted-in. It is therefore vital to get the respondent’s permission to use this channel and provide a way of unsubscribing if desired.

We hope you have found this information to be informative and inspiring. Please feel welcome to contact us if you’d like to explore your possibilities together. We love hearing about our customers’ individual challenges and seeing what solutions we can offer. And we love hearing about your successes too!

Open online surveys can be distributed via a whole range of methods. You’re not just limited to email! This means you have opportunities to be creative and try out different ways as you reach out to more interactive audiences. Take a look at our ideas and share yours with us.

Social media

Facebook

Facebook is the world’s most popular social media network with over 2 billion active users every month. That’s a huge collection of sociodemographic data for your surveys! However, the organic reach on Facebook is not what it used to be and won’t be sufficient for distributing your online surveys. These days, Facebook’s real potential lies in paid posts and ads. Facebook offers impressively extensive and detailed options for targeting, which enables you to pinpoint the exact audience you want to reach.

LinkedIn

Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has gathered over 547 million professional users and one million company profiles. These volumes are very interesting if your surveys research professionals and industries. Within LinkedIn you can share a survey as a company update, a personal post, banner, text ad or send it directly to selected individuals as a private message.

Twitter

Twitter’s audience comprises 310 million monthly active users. It is more diverse as engages consumers and professionals alike. Within Twitter you can use ads to target people based on their location, age, gender, device or keywords.

WeChat

In China, some market research organizations use a local social media network called WeChat to distribute online surveys. The WeChat messaging app is massively popular in China with 768 million active users every day.

Most popular messaging apps per country

Although WeChat’s network structure is often compared to WhatsApp or Facebook, it is, in fact, very different. The WeChat app has been evolving into a full-service platform as it strives to be everything at once: a place for chatting, shopping, gaming and banking. Alongside a wider range of services, WeChat’s users benefit from easy integration with other apps, including Facebook.

All this makes WeChat a fantastic opportunity for engaging different audiences across China. For example, if your organization has a company page on WeChat with followers, then it’s possible to display your survey link either on your page or send it directly to followers via a private WeChat message. To incentivize followers to respond the survey, you can redirect them from the WeChat app to the company’s website where a reward awaits.

Even though this idea is easy to implement, it still requires a bit of technological knowledge. You can take advantage of our experience with this solution by deploying your WeChat project through Nfield Online.

WATCH OUT

WhatsApp currently holds the status of being the most popular messaging app in the world.  The Facebook Corporation bought WhatsApp a few years ago and in 2016 partly integrated user accounts across the two apps. Even though this has happened, the Facebook Corporation remains very cautious about privacy and spammy user experiences and doesn’t allow third-party ads to be displayed in WhatsApp. Compared to WeChat, WhatsApp’s commercial usage is more restricted and it doesn’t allow for distribution of online surveys in the same way – at least for now.

Physical touchpoints

Offices, reception desks, shops and presence at trade shows, seminars and other industry events are all physical touchpoints between companies and potential survey respondents. Printed materials, interior décor, products and touch screens all provide opportunities for inviting survey participation. Which means you can turn any physical environment into a place for conducting everything from customer or employee satisfaction surveys to product research.  

QR codes

Quick Response (QR) codes are those digital squares you find in all kinds of places. The square contains a unique two-dimensional, usually black and white code, which can be read via dedicated QR barcode readers and smartphones. You can easily generate unique QR codes for your surveys with simple tools such as www.qr-code-generator.com. These can then be printed on business cards, product sheets, leaflets, posters, packaging and even products, and displayed in exhibition booths, reception areas, around premises, on vehicles and more.

It’s worth remembering that printed QR codes will remain in circulation for an indefinite period of time. This means they are only appropriate for surveys which will remain active for a long time, such as ongoing consumer satisfaction surveys.

Because people usually read QR codes from their smartphones, the surveys these link to must be optimized for completion via a smartphone.

Beacons

Beacons make it possible to invite passersby to take a short survey about their current experience of a precise location in real time. For example, you can instantly survey visitors to buildings and events about their opinions of their immediate environment. A great opportunity everywhere from airports to trade shows to ask people for improvement suggestions.

Each Beacon is effectively a cheap, small Bluetooth transmitter. The standard broadcast range spans from a couple of centimeters to 100 meters. While GPS is a great tool for locating bigger targets on a map such as streets and buildings, Beacon technology enables you to pinpoint exactly where an individual is standing, even inside a building, to a precision of one meter.

Beacons don’t follow people, they search for devices within their range. When they detect nearby smartphones and tablets, they send out a message which has been designed and saved in the Beacon. However, this is a one-way transfer. Beacons don’t receive messages from the nearby devices. This means that the survey invitation you send from a Beacon has to redirect the recipient from the Beacon message to the first question of the survey, because the Beacon cannot receive and save the survey responses themselves.

Every smartphone or tablet is a potential receiver of Beacon messages, but they will only work is they have:

• the Bluetooth function activated
• a mobile app installed which receives and acts upon Beacon signals.

The two biggest players in the beacon market are Apple with iBeacon and Google with Eddystone. The latter is better suited for market researchers. Messages coming from Eddystone Beacons are automatically picked up by the ever-present Google Chrome app. So you don’t have to build your own app. In contrast, Apple’s iBeacon solution requires a specially designed app to interact with the Beacon’s messages.
https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/
https://developers.google.com/beacons/

Share your ideas

Do you have other creative ways of distributing survey invitations? Maybe there’s more we can do to help you integrate these with Nfield Online? Tell us about them by emailing info@nipo.com

Distributing online surveys via email has become the most common way to reach an audience. While emailing itself is an easy method, professional survey systems provide more sophisticated options to help you achieve your desired results. Here’s what you need to know about the two most important ones.

<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.

Respondent keys

A respondent key is a random combination of characters and/or numbers added to the end of the survey link. It’s this combination which makes each survey link unique, even though it points to the same survey. This uniqueness enables Nfield Online to identify recipients and ensure that only those who were directly invited can participate in the survey.

domain.com/survey-about-pets/respondentkey1
domain.com/survey-about-pets/respondentkey2
domain.com/survey-about-pets/respondentkey3

Sample providers
 
Sample providers administer extensive databases of individuals who at some point agreed to participate in surveys. Their databases usually contain basic sociodemographic data by which email lists are filtered. Sample providers also perform more detailed and time-consuming pre-selection of individuals according to survey requirements.
 
Thanks to unique respondent keys, once a survey project is finished, market researchers can inform their sample providers about which recipients didn’t start the survey or unsubscribed from the email list. This information is very important for a good email reputation and the privacy rights of recipients.
 
In addition to the administration of contact databases, sample providers incentivize recipients to participate in surveys. Respondents are typically redirected by Nfield Online to the sample provider’s website after completing the survey.  

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

Your email reputation score directly affects how many of your survey invitations actually arrive in people’s inboxes. If you have a bad email reputation score, your survey will be diverted into spam folders or may even be blocked completely. The result of which is the people you hoped to participate in your survey will never see your invitation. So you’ll never receive their responses and your survey conclusions will be less complete. Here is a handy guide to looking after your email reputation, so your surveys can be more successful.

Your destiny is in your hands!

Every Nfield Online customer gets a new Nfield Online domain to set up surveys, manage respondents, send out survey invitations, monitor respondents and gather collected responses.

Your Nfield Online domain is unique and can only be accessed by you, the owning customer. We don’t even have the right to look inside its administration unless you specifically ask us to do so for customer service purposes. This means you have complete control over your Nfield Online domain’s email reputation.

We understand this may seem like a daunting responsibility if you are new to the topic of email reputation. But don’t worry! Nfield Online is equipped with tips to guide you through. We’ve also compiled the handy guide below on how to successfully build a good, everlasting email reputation.

Step 1: Identity

Identifying where an email has been sent from plays a major role in email reputation. Recipients have a right to know who’s contacting them. And email service providers endeavor to ensure this happens by checking you are who you say you are.

State who you are

Absence of a physical address and/or signature in an email will add to its spam rating. To protect your email reputation, we have made this field mandatory in Nfield Online. Our survey system doesn’t allow you to send out emails unless you provide the company’s real name and physical address.

Specify your sender email address

Nfield Online survey invitations allow you to choose which email address they are sent from. Because this information must be provided, the default ‘From’ field is automatically filled in with noreply@yourNfieldOnlinedomain.com. If you wish, you can overwrite this with any valid address of your choice. Either at the default domain level or at individual survey level. So if you want to, you can send different surveys from different email addresses.

1. Your Nfield Online sender address

Because a new Nfield Online domain has never been used before, its email reputation is also completely ‘clean’. In fact, it’s even better: thanks to good technical practices at Nfield Online, all new domains are already rated 3 out of 5 when we hand them over. So if you decide to keep the Nfield Online sender address (e.g. companyname@nfielddomain.com), your first emails should arrive reliably. They are unlikely to be classed as spam unless you immediately adopt bad practices. But beware, as soon as you start using the Nfield domain, everything you do will influence its reputation moving forward. For better or for worse. So look after it well!

2. Your other sender address

If you choose to use a different email address (e.g. companyname@gmail.com), at any point, your survey invitations will be treated according to that address’s email reputation. So be sure to check whether the reputation of the address you want to use is good enough to reliably deliver your invitations.

Prove it’s really you

Spammers often pretend to be other people by spoofing their IP addresses and sending domains. Spam filters therefore check for ownership authentications when deciding what to do with an email.

Verify your emailing domain with:​​​

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This authentication enables owners to publish a list of IP addresses that can send emails on their behalf.
• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): The authentication method that proves an email originated at a specific domain and has not been changed during delivery.

This verification is an easy task for your system administrator. It’s only required once and must be done before you send out the first email. If you experience any difficulties in doing it, please contact us and we will help you out straightaway.

Step 2: Engagement

Email providers consider engagement as a crucial indicator of how welcome your messages are to their recipients. The way people interact with your emails, from whether or not they open them and click the links to whether they unsubscribe or mark them as spam, reveals whether or not they wish to keep them coming.

The best scenario for your email reputation is when recipients open and click the links. Unsubscribes, as long as you don’t have too many of them, are neutral. The very worst outcome is when recipients mark your messages as spam. Some email providers are very sensitive to this and only a few spam reports can send a reputation steeply downhill. As a sender, you need to do everything possible to prevent this from happening.

The two biggest influencers of engagement are the appropriateness of your database and how interested recipients are in the content of your messages.

Enable recipients to unsubscribe, simply and immediately

If somebody doesn’t want to receive your messages and you don’t make it easy for them to unsubscribe, they are likely to hit the spam button instead. To encourage unsubscribes over spam marking, we have made the ‘unsubscribe link’ field mandatory in Nfield Online survey correspondence. It’s worth remembering that if you only send survey invitations to people who are expecting them from you, the unsubscribe rate should be low anyhow.

Only send survey invitations to people who are into you

If you send survey invitations to people who either didn’t specifically give consent or aren’t interested in your survey activities, many of them will simply move the survey invitation from an inbox to a spam folder. This will damage your email reputation. It’s possible they might just unsubscribe instead. But if you have a very high unsubscribe rate this also may be damaging.

Clean your email database. Again, again, and again

• Unresponsive recipients
  • Before sending a survey invitation, remove any erroneous addresses from your database and check for validity by using tools such as those found at www.datavalidation.com or www.listwisehq.com.
  • After sending a survey, continuously monitor how recipients are behaving to identify those who are not taking action. Nfield Online closed surveys enable you to see which recipients didn’t open the email invitation or opened it but didn’t click though to the survey itself. This information can be found by clicking the ‘Manage respondents’ bookmark. Be sure to do this for every survey. If you identify recipients who are repeatedly unresponsive, you should consider removing them from the database because their lack of engagement is likely to be damaging to your email reputation.

• Unsubscribes
  Recipients who opted to unsubscribe can be seen in Nfield Online via the ‘Blacklist’. It’s vital that you make sure these people do not receive any more of your survey invitations. Delete them from your database or share the file with whoever is responsible for managing your panel respondents. It’s very rude to send these people more invitations and they keep getting them they are likely to hit the spam button, which is terrible for your email reputation of cours

• Spam reports
  Recipients who have complained about your email, usually by labeling it as spam, can be seen via Nfield Online’s ‘Abuse report’ which can be found within the ‘Manage respondents’ area. These recipients must also be removed from your database immediately.

Ask your sample provider about their database practices

Many researchers contract the services of sample providers to obtain contact details of suitable survey recipients. This transfers responsibility for the database’s administration to a third party. But it’s your reputation that will suffer if the contacts provided are not suitable. To protect these, it’s a really good idea to ask your sample provider about their practices for acquiring new contacts and maintaining their database.

Compose an eye-catching survey invitation

With so many emails, articles and shocking news stories constantly competing for attention, getting your survey invitation noticed is a tough job. To be successful in this, you need to be meticulous in every detail. The survey invitation must be visually appealing and instantly clear. Never just present it as unformatted text on a plain white background. Personalize, be straightforward and be honest. Briefly explain why you are contacting this recipient, why this survey matters (to them) and what you plan to do with the information they provide.

Step 3: Content

Composing emails which are suitable for multiple recipients is a specific discipline. The way you present words, images and other elements can have a huge impact on your recipients’ behavior. And your email reputation.

Choose your words carefully

Avoid words which are typically found in spam such as ‘urgent’ and ‘for free’. If you look at the emails which have arrived in your own spam folder, you can get a good idea of which words repeatedly appear. These are likely to be the red flags which lead email service providers into believing an email is spam.

Write an appealing subject line

The right choice of words for your subject line is even more important. This line should be short, clear (to the point) and personalized. In a world of short attention spans, it’s essential your recipient can instantly identify your message as interesting to them. Otherwise they may not even bother to open it.

Avoid ‘dirty’ formatting

• WRITING IN ALL CAPS
• exaggerated punctuation!!!???
• using too many different font colors
• using large font sizes (anything greater than 10pt or 12pt)

Don’t let pictures take over

Pictures can be great attention grabbers, but when they are too large or there are too many of them in an email, the spam alarm bells can start to ring. Many email providers block pictures from appearing automatically, which cancels their impact as recipients don’t even see them.

Use original URL links

Avoid using URL shorteners (such as bitly) in emails. Spammers frequently abuse these tools, which means email providers will count them against you.

Keep your email’s HTML code clean

This means ensuring the HTML code only contains directly relevant instructions. If you copy-paste styled text from a Word file straight to your email, the HTML will include all kinds of irrelevant formatting elements, which have a negative impact on your email reputation score. To avoid this, either compose your email text directly in Nfield Online or copy-paste it from Notepad and then style the formatting in Nfield Online.

Step 4: More bite-sized tips

Ultimately, learn a few practical tips that may impact the success of your survey invations. These tips are not topic-specific and give you the references on useful websites and contacts you may need when discovering how to make your email delivery spotless.

Build up slowly and carefully

Starting safely with sending your Nfield Online survey invitations is a good exercise for enhancing your email reputation and developing good habits. If you limit your first survey invitations to recipients you know you can rely on to engage, you set yourself up for giving email service providers a positive impression.

If possible, perform this ‘reliable respondent’ exercise more than once to really boost your email reputation. This will give your future distributions a much better chance of getting straight to their intended inboxes. If you commence your survey invitation activity by sending an invitation to a bad quality database, your email reputation will rapidly spiral downwards. And that can be a very hard thing to undo.

Be a predictable communicator

Random and erratic emailing activity will bring your reputation down. Try to establish a consistent email sending routine, as distribution spikes won’t help your email reputation.

Forget trials

There’s no such thing as a ‘trial email’ when comes to email reputation. Every testing round is real to email service providers and absolutely every sent email is evaluated. Regardless of the purpose, treat every email as a VIP.

Check your sender reputation score

This score is calculated using traditional email metrics such as unsubscribes and spam reports. The sender score is on a scale from 1 to 100 – the higher the better. Emails with a score lower than 70 aren’t usually delivered to inboxes.
www.senderscore.org

Test for technical errors

Technical errors can also be bad for email reputation. Test how your email looks on different platforms and devices before sending it. Check the technical report for errors. Correct these and test again, until it’s perfect.
www.litmus.com or www.mail-tester.com

Could you be on a blacklist?

If things go extremely wrong with your emailing practice, your survey domain can end up on a blacklist. This would result in your emails being blocked as you are considered to be a serious abuser. If you find yourself experiencing serious delivery problems, please let us know and we will check whether your domain has found its way onto any blacklists.

Say ‘hello’ to NIPO team members

We are happy to help, guide you through and receive feedback on your emailing experiences via Nfield Online. Feel free to contact our team members at info@nipo.com or go straight to your regular NIPO contact person.

“Sorry, I’m giving up on this!” I was responding to an airline’s flight experience survey via my mobile phone. The airline in question had taken good care of me and enabled me to carry my precious cat as hand-luggage from Hong Kong SAR to Amsterdam. I was willing to give them a great rating for every aspect of my experience, from booking to food to inflight service. But during the process of answering their questions, I reached my tolerance limit for the task. Providing a seemingly endless stream of responses within a continuous grid layout was simply too mundane and boring.

I got to the point where I was just entering random responses in a quest to get to the end. Which did nothing for the accuracy of their results and lowered my overall glowing perception of the company. Nobody gained anything.  

Why mobility matters

The use of mobile devices is continuing to grow rapidly and is a not-to-be-ignored element in the online communication mix. In some parts of the world, mobile now exceeds the use of traditional desktop machines.

Go to StatCount to find out how the mobile coverage is defined in your region.

So how does this impact your surveys?

Because mobile devices have smaller screens than desktops and are often used away from the calm, static office environment, they need to deliver content in a way that’s more instantly digestible and engaging to keep users focused. When it comes to surveys, long, boring-looking questions are doomed to failure, as they demand too much effort. User attention is best achieved by keeping them entertained.

For this reason, you need to think a lot more carefully about how to approach and design surveys. Yes, you’ll need to invest time and effort, but the rewards will be noticeable, with significantly higher response rates and better quality answers.

Go mobile first

You’ve probably heard of the term “mobile first”. This refers to the principle of initially designing all content to meet the needs of mobile users, then adapting it afterwards for desktop consumption.

Designing surveys in this way starts with considering the specific requirements of mobile users. For example:

1. The survey needs to be kept short. Completion must be possible in under 5 minutes
2. Each page must be easy to read and fit comfortably on a small screen, without scrolling
3. Avoid large tables with endless statements
4. Use simple sentences and only ask what you really need to know
5. Surveys need to be as interesting and engaging as possible. This can be achieved through techniques such as gamification, easy-to-use interface and variety of question types

The solution is right here!

Nfield surveys are designed to accommodate a mobile first strategy, while continuing to satisfy desktop users. For a start, our layouts are fully responsive to all screen sizes and device types. You only have to create your survey once, while Nfield automatically detects the nature of the screen it’s being viewed on and presents the most appropriate layout. So every user experiences your survey in an optimal way, no matter what device they are using, even if they switch mid-completion.

Switching between devices while continuing the same activity is a recognized phenomenon. Just as Netflix lets you seamlessly continue your viewing as you switch between television, tablet and phone, Nfield lets survey respondents start on one device and continue on another. This relieves pressure on respondents to complete the survey while on-the-go. Their already-entered answers are stored and they can continue right where they left off, on any device.

What’s more, Nfield makes the most of mobile respondent behavior and delivers a range of additional benefits, including:

• capturing on-the-spot feedback from customers
• obtaining faster responses
• achieving better coverage of some demographic groups
• enabling improved quality checks (for field work) with photographic and GPS evidence

More of what your mobile users need

By ensuring your surveys truly meet the needs of mobile users, Nfield sets you up for survey success.

More fingertip-friendly

“Clickable” on-screen elements are very reactive and easy to use, without the need to trigger the magnifying glass feature offered by some devices. 

Nfield capitalizes on mobile users’ instinctive actions by presenting functionality in similar ways to commonly used apps. For example, questions can be answered by drag-and-drop or by swiping, thereby adding variety and keeping users engaged. 

More Graphics

Images play a big part in giving respondents an enjoyable and engaging experience. But it is essential to keep your image file sizes to a minimum. No one wants to wait for an 8 MB image to load before getting on with the survey! There are many programs available for reducing image size without losing sharpness or causing distortion.

Once you’ve taken care of the size of your image data, Nfield takes care of the size of your image on the screen, automatically adjusting each one to fit. So no matter what device or screen size your respondent is using, they always get a perfect view without having to scroll.

Nfield also enables the use of images for answering multiple code questions. Sometimes using icons (with single color) can be a good way to reduce boredom and improve the experience.

More variety

Nfield provides a good variety of question types to make the whole experience for your mobile respondents more engaging.

You can use drag-and-drop, image maps, sum sliders, star-ratings, matrices and more. Mixing these up within a survey creates variety which keeps the respondent more attentive and focused, which will result in better data quality. 

Nfield even takes care of matrix questions, which can be a real problem on mobile devices if not correctly resized. By automatically re-structuring these into a card presentation for mobile devices, Nfield makes matrix questions as easy as any other to answer. Readable, finger-tip friendly and fully aligned with the mobile first principle. 

Nfield takes you further

Are you looking to improve your response rates? Are your surveys delivering an enjoyable experience to respondents? Feel free to share your example with us so we can examine it together and identify where improvements can be made.

You can now connect and query an external source during an online interview in Nfield. A much sought-after feature by many of our customers. Forget about complex list and algorithm management in the script. Instead connect to a web service to consult up-to-date lists of e.g. car brands or postal codes and apply these in the Nfield interview.

Click on the link below to do a (short) survey on crypto currencies that monitors the real-time value of your wallet as you are progressing through the questions.

Check our demo survey that highlights this new and powerful feature in action.
Click here!

Because the amount of data sources / APIs / systems that you may wish to query is endless, we have implemented a standard way to pass parameters, consume responses and a configure secure HTTPS endpoints. This way you get predictable performance at maximum flexibility.

HTTPS endpoints can be configured for the whole domain. The configuration is as simple as adding a URL and one or more named headers and values. These headers can be used for example to pass along an API key or a JWT token. Nfield does not attach any meaning to the configured headers; it simply sends them. As an extra measure of security domain administrators can see which headers are configured, but the value will be masked once entered and saved.

Because we have standardized the interface, you may need to develop bridging applications between the source you try to connect and Nfield. In calling an API you can pass your own parameters and values. The result format however is strictly defined. The JSON output from your web service or API to Nfield must be data: {xxxxx}. Nfield cannot process anything else (e.g. result: {xxxxx} or location: {xxxx}). In this case you either must find another API that does provide date output in the required format or -more likely- create a bridging layer that re-formats the data output. The NIPO Support team is available to explain how to do this.