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.

This series of Academy sessions is on how Nfield can support you in your GDPR compliance.

This series of Academy sessions put focus on efficient scripting in Nfield, when using long lists. We introduced a new method to store the answers. Requiring less positions so you will not reach the “maximum positions” as easily as you do now when using the large list multiple times in a script.

The relationship between reputation and business success is a well-known fact. While a good reputation improves sales performance and increases a brand’s value, a bad reputation can rapidly take a business downhill. Aware of this, many companies pay meticulous attention to detail when it comes to product quality and customer service. Yet they often overlook the need to also maintain a good email reputation, which directly impacts the ability to communicate online.

What is email reputation

Email reputation is a technical metric which email service providers use to decide the ‘credibility’ of sent messages. It is defined by a score relating to the sender domain (i.e. the “nipo.com” part of an email address).

This score, which can continually change, determines whether messages get delivered into recipients’ inboxes, spam folders or are even delivered at all. You can think of it a bit like a personal credit rating, which banks use to decide whether they should lend you money.

Why email reputation matters to market researchers

There’s no point in sending out a survey invitation if it won’t arrive in recipients’ inboxes. If your sender domain has a bad reputation, your message is likely to be swallowed into people’s spam folders or, worse still, be blocked from being delivered at all.

But if care has been taken to adopt good practices which result in a good email reputation, your survey invitations are much more likely to arrive in a place they’ll be seen, reaching recipients’ inboxes directly and without delay.

The sender domain’s email reputation can therefore make or break the success of your market research project.

Why the email reputation system was created

The ease and cost-effectiveness of using email to communicate with consumers and companies alike has led to staggering amounts of email traffic. There are currently 3 billion email users worldwide, and rising – approximately 50% of the planet’s population.  

Unfortunately, this simplicity and accessibility has given rise to spamming and dishonest emailing practices, by which irrelevant or unsolicited emails are sent, typically to a large number of recipients, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, and distributing malware. This has turned into a big business, with various reports estimating that spam messages account for 50 – 80% of the world’s email traffic.

Email service providers needed to do something to protect email recipientsfrom the influx of unwanted and dangerous emails, which has resulted in the email reputation system currently in use.

How email reputation works

Email reputation is the total result of combining a number of quantitative metrics designed to evaluate how honest and well-targeted emails from a particular domain are. The total score a domain accrues determines whether its outgoing messages are blocked, directed to spam folders or successfully delivered to inboxes.

Whatever role you work in, it’s worth understanding the two most fundamental aspects of email reputation:

• Email reputation measurement is primarily based on the sending domain (e.g. “nipo.com”) rather than individual email addresses (e.g. “person@nipo.com”). But there are no universal rules for achieving a good reputation because each email service provider (Google, Outlook, etc…) applies different, publicly unknown algorithms. This means that what works for one email provider won’t necessarily work for other email providers.
   

• An email reputation score is derived over a domain’s entire lifetime. It starts being calculated from the very first email sent from that domain, and continues to be adjusted with every email that goes out. The reputation can improve and decline over time, but the score can never be completely reset to start all over again. A domain which has earned itself a very bad reputation, at any point, will have to live with the consequences forever.

And this is one of the most difficult things with email reputation: it can take a long time to earn a good reputation, but it is possible to destroy it in an instant. Vigilance in responsible email practices needs to be applied at all times.

If you want impressive response rates, look after your email reputation!

Aspects which influence email reputation score

Events and aspects which are widely understood to damage email reputation include:

Recipients marking email as spam – The more times your emails are marked by recipients as spam, the more likely email service providers are to conclude that you’re sending unsolicited messages.

Poor email engagement – Email providers are interested in how relevant your messages are to their recipients, and they judge this by what percentage of the mails get opened. A low open rate is considered to mean recipients aren’t interested in them.

Invalid recipient addresses – Sending messages to invalid email addresses is fatal for your email reputation. It’s a clear sign that you don’t actually know who you are sending your messages to.

Type of email content – Email providers have become very skilled in identifying certain keywords and phrases which are likely to indicate an email as being unsolicited or dangerous. All messages are scanned for these.

Unverified sending domain – Dangerous senders often try to pretend to be someone they are not by using someone else’s domain. Many email service providers therefore block emails coming from an unverified sender domain.

Irregular frequency and volumeof emails – Because spammers don’t tend to have a consistent send frequency, email providers look at how often your messages are sent out. Changing the frequency may damage your email reputation.

Lack of history – If there is no history, email providers cannot draw any conclusions about your intentions. Remember that you start enhancing or damaging your email reputation from the first send-out.

How to build and maintain a good email reputation

The good news is that you can always have control over your email reputation.
To find out how, check out our practical guide on building a good reputation and ensuring smooth delivery of all your survey invitations sent out by Nfield Online.

Cyber attacks are continuing to increase globally in both number and scale, impacting all kinds of organizations in all kinds of industries. Every company is a potential target. Which means market researchers need to be as aware as anyone about the possible threats and take the necessary preventative action. This calls for being armed with the relevant knowledge and having a system which robustly protects survey data and, with that, company reputation.

A single “NotPetya” ransomware attack in June 2017 led to Nurofen maker Reckitt Benckiser taking an estimated EUR 110 million hit in revenue*. 

*source: the Guardian 6 July 2017

Just think about what would happen if your company falls victim to malware which compromises your entire fieldwork operation, causing irretrievable loss of your fieldwork and respondent data. Not to mention the damage done to your client relationships.

We did, which is why NIPO’s Nfield survey systems are designed to keep cyber attackers out. But optimal cyber security also depends on good human awareness of the threats, so people themselves do not become the vulnerable weak link. We therefore held a webinar about cyber security to educate our customers and help them protect their interests.

In this, NIPO explains why IT security in market research matters to you, provides guidance on what you can do to keep cyber attackers out and answers questions such as: 

• What are the probable external and internal cyber threats, and how could they damage your market research business?
• What is the correlation between the different types of infrastructure (on premise, hosted or cloud) and data security vulnerability?
• What is ISO 27001-2013 certification, and why is it so important and indispensable for your research business?
• Is there such thing as a “checklist” to run business securely?

Find out more
For more details on how NIPO ensures cyber security in its solutions and business, see the Nfield security factsheet. 

So what’s next?
If you would talk about whether your current solution meets the required security standards, then let us know. You can contact us at sales@nipo.com.

This series of Academy sessions put focus on emailing in Nfield Online. We shared the do’s and don’ts when sending email invitations to your respondents, although the session video only shows an overview of how emailing is being implemented in the Nfield Manager.

In this Academy session we explain the files Nfield uses and generates, along with all the possibilities. We elaborate on the relation of the U-file and O-file with the script. More details are shared about the paradata, all the information in there and how that could be used. Finally, we will discuss the media files.

A webinar about working with the NIPO DSC for IBM SPSS. With the NIPO DSC you can open NIPO Software data directly in SPSS. There is no need to convert the data. With the NIPO DSC you can run your data processing and analytical processes completely in IBM SPSS, even though the data is collected using NIPO Software’s technology.

Learn the basics on how to theme the NfieldChicago template.

Introduction to the ODIN syntax and new features of the NfieldChicago template.