Email campaigns

An email campaign is one of several distributors you can attach to a published survey. It sends invitations to a chosen set of contacts, tracks opens and completions, and lets you follow up with people who haven’t responded.

You can run an email campaign alongside other distributors — a web link or QR code — at the same time. Each distributor reports its own metrics, so you can see how the email campaign performed separately from the link you posted elsewhere.

Email campaigns are available on the Solo plan and above.

Setting one up

1. Publish your survey, then open Distribute and add an Email Campaign distributor.
2. Choose your recipients — an existing contact list, an auto-group (a dynamic segment), or a manual selection from your contacts.
3. Write your subject line and email body, or start from a template. Your work saves automatically as you go, so you can leave and come back to a draft.
4. Send a test email to yourself, or to another member of your workspace, to check the subject, formatting, and merge fields before anything reaches real recipients. The survey link in a test is a placeholder, so it’s for reviewing wording and layout, not for confirming the real link works.
5. Choose when it sends: immediately, scheduled for a specific date and time, or — on the Growth plan and above — as a recurring campaign.
6. After sending, open the campaign to see sent, delivered, estimated opens, and completions. Treat opens as a rough signal rather than an exact count — some email apps open messages automatically — and use completions as the more reliable read on engagement. If response is low, add a Reminder message to the same campaign, scoped to just the people who haven’t responded. Set a send time and it goes out on its own — you don’t have to come back and trigger it.

Example

A CX manager runs a quarterly NPS survey to their full customer contact list. They schedule the initial send for 9am Tuesday. Four days later they check the metrics, see that about a third of recipients haven’t completed it, and add a Reminder message scheduled for that Friday — it goes only to that non-responding group, not the whole list.

Troubleshooting

Some contacts aren’t receiving the email. Contacts who have unsubscribed or previously bounced are suppressed from campaigns automatically. Check your suppression list before assuming there is a delivery problem.

I need to cancel a scheduled send. You can cancel a campaign while it is still scheduled or queued. Once sending has actually started it can no longer be cancelled, so act before the send window opens.

I want to run the same survey again for a new period. Duplicate the existing campaign rather than rebuilding it, then update the audience and the send date.

I want the email to come from our own domain. Email white-labeling is available on the Growth plan and above, but not during the free trial. Open White-Label from your account menu, enter the domain your emails should come from, and add the DNS records it shows you at your domain provider. Once they check out, the page says Verified and your campaigns send from the address you save there. If you would rather send through your own mail server, Custom SMTP does that on the same plans (Growth and above, not during the free trial). Under Your own mail server (SMTP) on the same page, enter the server, port, login and password, and the From address your server allows. SurveyRock tests the connection before it saves anything, and keeps the login encrypted. Campaigns and test emails then go through your server. SurveyRock skips suppressed addresses, adds the unsubscribe link, and records whether your server accepted each message. Until a domain is verified or a server is saved, campaigns send from a SurveyRock address, with your workspace name as the sender name. Your own domain for the survey link itself, so respondents see yours and not ours, is available on the Growth plan and above too.

For the DNS records, what falls back and what still comes from SurveyRock, see Send survey emails from your own mail server or domain.

I want to text the survey instead of emailing it. SMS and WhatsApp distribution are not available yet. Use a QR code or web link distributor if you need a text-friendly way to share the survey in the meantime.

How reminders work. A Reminder is a follow-up message inside the same campaign, not a separate one — add it from the campaign’s message list. It’s aimed automatically at people who haven’t completed the survey, so you’re never re-nagging someone who already responded. Nothing goes out until you add one and give it a send time; once you do, it sends on its own at that time. SurveyRock never creates or schedules a reminder for you.