Sending Surveys
After you've designed and previewed your survey, create a collector to send it out. You can send a survey via URL, email, buy responses, and more. Survey responses are then recorded in the Analyze Responses section of your account.
Managing Survey Collector Options
Collector options are settings that affect who can access your survey, how many times respondents can take the survey, and what respondents see when they're done. Require a password, close the survey at a specific date or response count, or keep a survey anonymous.
Enable multiple responses if you want people to take your survey more than once from the same browser. This collector option is helpful if you expect survey takers to take your survey on a shared device, like in a computer lab or on a public kiosk.
You can allow people who take your survey to edit their responses either while completing the survey or after they submit it. Survey creators can edit survey responses for a respondent from the Individual Responses tab.
Manually Entering Survey Responses
Manual Data Entry allows you to input responses you collected offline or to add responses on behalf of someone without an internet connection. There is no way to upload survey responses in bulk.
Survey Takers Can’t Complete My Survey
Read these tips if your respondents are reporting trouble accessing or completing your survey.
Can a survey be saved and finished later?
The survey creator needs to edit the Collector settings to allow respondents to edit their responses. Then respondents can complete a portion of the survey and return later to finish the rest.
Why does the survey time out or not fully load a page?
If a survey design is very long with many questions, answer choices, or images on a single page, this may cause issues with loading time.
Can a respondent fill out the same question or page multiple times?
You can allow respondents to take a survey more than once or copy questions so respondents can fill out as many as they need. If those options don't meet your needs, Wufoo might be right for you.
Why are answers already selected when I try to take a survey?
The survey settings allow responses to be edited. Please contact the survey creator who can disable editing.
Creating a Web Link for Your Survey
The Web Link collector is the fastest and most versatile way to share your survey link and collect responses. It will generate a short URL and QR Code that you can post wherever you'd like.
You can change the domain of your survey link or create a Custom URL Ending to make your link more relevant to your survey and respondents.
If you're trying to take a survey but the link doesn't work, read these troubleshooting tips.
The Recurrence collector option automatically creates new Web Links at a frequency you choose, and emails you when they're ready to share.
Download and share a QR code so people can scan the code with their smartphone and take your survey.
Sending Surveys via Email Invitation
Send your survey in an email invitation and track who responded. Follow the steps to compose your message, choose your collector options, send or schedule your message, send reminder and thank you messages, and track responses.
When you create an Email Invitation collector to send your survey, you have a few options for how to set up the email. You can embed the first survey question in your email, choose from different message formats, or select a previously used message.
If you send your survey via email invitation, you can track how many people opened your invitation, clicked through to the survey, or responded to your survey.
Sending Reminder and Thank You Emails
After sending an Email Invitation, you can follow up with contacts to remind them to take your survey or thank them for taking it. You can choose to set up automated follow-up emails or one-off follow-up emails.
When someone completes a survey sent by an Email Invitation, automatically send them a confirmation email that lets them know you received the survey and includes a link to see their answers.
Troubleshooting Issues with an Email Invitation
Learn why people didn't get your email invitation, how long it takes to send a message, what the status of a message means, and what to do if you can't send a message.
We monitor outgoing messages from Email Collectors for spam and abuse. Make sure to read our Acceptable Uses Policy so you understand what is and is not permitted, and follow these guidelines.
Embedding Questions in Email Invitations
If you're using a supported question type as the first question in your survey and it meets the design requirements, you can embed a question in an email so people can respond with just one click.
Sender Email Address & Verification
Contacts see the sender email address in the From field of your emails. You need to verify a sender email address to send email invitations from your account.
Required Data in Email Invitations
All surveys sent via Email Invitation need to include a survey link and opt out link. The opt out link allows contacts to unsubscribe from surveys sent through your account via the Email Invitation Collector. On some plans, you can hide the SurveyMonkey footer.
Occasionally, a message you try to send may be flagged for review and marked as Pending Approval. Additionally, if you exceed bounce rates or abuse rates, we may suspend your mailing privileges. To send a survey right away, create a Web Link Collector.
Sending Multilingual Surveys by Email Invitation
The multilingual Email Invitation Collector lets you send customized email invitations for your surveys in multiple languages, send follow-up reminder or thank you emails, monitor email analytics, and track who responded.
Adding Contacts to Email Invitations
You can keep a list of contacts in SurveyMonkey and send them Email Invitations to take your surveys. Upload a spreadsheet of contacts, or import from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, LinkedIn, Microsoft 365, or Outlook.com.
Email Invitation and Contact Limits
Be aware of the following sending, importing, contact, and character limits when sending messages through an Email Invitation collector or storing information about survey takers in Contacts.
Storing and Organizing Your SurveyMonkey Contacts
Use groups to send survey invitations to specific contacts using the Email Invitation Collector. Click the down arrow to the right of a group to copy, rename, or delete the group.
Some of your recipients or contacts may be labeled as opted out or bounced in your Email Invitation collector, Text Message collector, or Contacts. People who opt out of taking surveys you send or contact info that bounce messages are labeled as opted out or bounced.
Using Custom Data to Store Contact Info
Custom Data lets you store extra info in Contacts about the people you invite to take your survey, and include it with your survey results. You can also use custom data to personalize messages when using Email Invitation.
When sending a multilingual survey via email invitation, you need to assign a language code to each of your contacts.
Buying Responses with SurveyMonkey Audience
Buy an Audience project if you need people to take your survey. You can target the types of people you want to hear from based on specific attributes, like country, gender, age-range, income, employment status, and more.
Embedding Your Survey or Form on a Website
Use a Website collector to embed a survey on your website or pop-up a survey invitation. To add one, you only need a basic understanding of HTML and access to your website’s source code. We’ll give you an embed code you can copy and paste.
Sending a Survey via Text Message
Text people a link to take your survey. Survey takers can open the link to take the survey in their mobile browser.
Share Your Survey on Social Media
The Social Media collector lets you post a link to your survey on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. You can also copy the survey link to share the survey wherever you want.
Sharing Surveys in Facebook Messenger
You can create a survey for people to take in Messenger. People chat with the SurveyMonkey bot to answer the survey questions, and the results are recorded in your SurveyMonkey account.
Use offline mode and the SurveyMonkey Anywhere app to collect responses without an internet connection, then upload them back to SurveyMonkey once you have internet access.
You can use kiosk mode on the SurveyMonkey Anywhere app to turn your device into a survey-taking station, as long as you have an internet connection.
Our Mobile SDK lets an app developer add or trigger SurveyMonkey surveys into their iOS or Android apps.
You can automatically close your survey at a certain date and time from your collector options.
Limiting Responses to a Survey
You can turn on Response Limits in your collector options to automatically close a collector once a certain number of respondents have taken the survey through that collector. This was previously called the Maximum Response Count.
You can add a qualifying question to your survey to disqualify respondents who choose a particular answer option using Question Skip Logic. This allows you to disqualify respondents who don't meet your targeting criteria or consent to your terms. You can show respondents a custom disqualification message.
Restricting Survey Access by Password or IP Address
You can restrict access to your survey by password or IP address from the collector options.
Showing Respondents Instant Results
Instant Results allows you to show your respondents a real-time summary of survey results when they complete your survey. You can turn on Instant Results from your collector options. Instant Results does not show a respondent their individual survey response.
The Thumbnail Image & Text collector option lets you edit the link metadata that shows when you paste your survey link in social media, messaging apps, or texts. Metadata includes your survey title, description, and image.
You can add a Custom Thank You at the end of your survey. If you're using more than one collector to distribute your survey, you need to set up a Custom Thank You for each collector.
Can respondents print their responses?
You can edit the survey completion option to redirect respondents to a certificate you created outside of SurveyMonkey.
If you send your survey via email invitation, you can track how many people opened your invitation, clicked through to the survey, or responded to your survey.
There are different ways to track respondents. Before you send your survey, decide if you want to track who’s taken your survey or if you want to keep responses anonymous.
To collect anonymous responses, edit the collector options to disable IP address tracking and email address tracking before sending out your survey. You need to edit each of the collectors you have for the survey separately to make sure all your survey results are anonymous.
Custom Variables is a logic feature that allows you to track data about respondents by passing one or more values through a survey link and into your survey results.
Most collectors store the IP addresses of respondents in survey results by default. You can choose to restrict or allow IP addresses from being recorded in survey results in your collector options.
Survey notifications let you know when you have new survey responses.
Instant notifications let you quickly see new survey responses by sending you an email each time a response is submitted. You can manage instant notifications in your collector settings and share them with others.
Daily summary notifications are emails that let you know when you get new survey responses. For each survey with the daily summary turned on, you get a one-time email confirmation about your first response, and you'll get one daily email summarizing how many new responses you received.
Smart notifications let you send email notifications to you or others based on conditions you set. For example, you can set up a smart notification to send you an email each time someone answers a survey question with a specific answer.