Traditional Survey vs GatorSurvey - Which to use and when?
Here at Gator we are always improving our Products. One of our tools, Survey, has two versions available for use.
These versions vary in display style and functionality to cater for your different needs.
You may be asking, well if there are two tools how do I know which is better to use for my purposes? Well this article will help you figure out just that!
Traditional Survey Explained
Our Traditional Survey tool is located within GatorMail itself. It is a tool with a focus on use within email marketing campaigns rather than standalone use, although it is possible to create anonymous surveys to publish on your website.
As you can see above Traditional Survey does not use the Drag & Drop user interface. Instead it uses tabs and a question & answer tree. The level of customisation in your questions and answers stem from this tree structure.
Key Features...
- The tree format of the Questions & Answers enables you to easily see the pages in the Survey as well as the type of questions you are asking.
- You can use a custom built template to style your Survey in keeping with your brand guidelines.
- You can send notifications to anyone you like to tell them a survey has been completed. You can also include a live survey results link, particularly useful for internal colleagues to evaluate customer survey responses.
- Not only can you send standard notifications, you can use condition based notifications! These are triggered not only by the way someone completes the survey, but the data we store on them. For example, the participant may say they are only interested in MD's, so a notification is sent to a colleague who is handling these specific requests.
- You can set the Survey to be a normal question and answer survey, or to be an e-learning tool! If you use the e-learning survey type you can create a test for your participants, where on submission the completion message changes based upon whether the participant has passed or failed.
- You can enable re-takes in an e-learning and a standard survey.
- Traditional Survey allows HTML features to be added to e-learning and standard surveys so you can customise its appearance to your hearts content.
- Fields can be set as read only to prevent participants from changing the content. For example, if each participant has an account number then this can be set to read only as you wouldn't want them to alter this.
- You can add validation to fields. For example, you may have an "email" field where only business emails can be entered. Setting this to validation will prevent non-business emails being used.
- Contact Conditions enable you to display or not display certain questions according to data in a contacts Contact Record.
- It is possible to build audience groups based off of survey responses. These can be used in the entry point of a Workflow, a standalone campaign, or purely for reporting purposes.
- You can use Page Conditions so only certain pages of the survey display if a specific answer has been selected.
- Traditional Survey also offers dynamic functionality within your Surveys. For example, you can have one email campaign with one email and one survey link, but a different survey displays to differing audience members based off of data in a field of their Contact Record.
- You can create follow up rules in a Campaign based upon a survey being completed or not. This allows you to trigger an email being sent to the contact with a differing subject line, or a different email altogether.
- You can password protect surveys.
- In a Workflow you can create conditions based upon a survey being completed or accessed.
- The Survey results write back to your campaign results tab which includes not accessed, accessed but not completed, and completed. You can see these results in an individual user view of the survey.
Gator Survey Explained
GatorSurvey is the newer, visually engaging tool for survey creation which uses the Drag & Drop tool.
GatorSurvey has its own product area so you will see it on the primary SSO dashboard and top toolbar.
As you can see above the GatorSurvey tool combines your Survey settings and design elements into a single view. You can edit question content whilst also editing the appearance of said question.
Key Features
- GatorSurvey is very easy to use due to its Drag & Drop user interface.
- Survey results are stored in its own section in the tool, you cannot view survey results from the campaign results tab in terms of responses, however you can see the click through to the Survey.
- You can use surveys external from email campaigns as well as within them, such as on Social or from your website.
- GatorSurvey allows you to write back survey responses to most CRM systems, but it does not pass the survey responses back into GatorMail.
- You can use more interactive question types such as Star Rating and Range Slider which look nice on any survey.
- You can have Survey Revisions. For each revision of the Survey the results are stored in different revision tabs for ease of access, or all revisions displayed in one tab.
- You can select a previous survey to copy to keep styling consistent.
- You can use page conditions to determine how a participant moves through the survey.
- You have the ability to embed your survey into any webpage.
- Multi-select boxes can have a limit of checks applied to them.
Key Differences Between the Products
| Traditional Survey | GatorSurvey |
|---|---|
| Question & Answer Tree format | Uses Drag & Drop Editor |
| Has to be part of an email campaign other than using an anonymous based surveys. | Can be used in email campaigns and externally on website pages or as a link |
| Writes back answers to the campaign results | Does not write back to the campaign |
| Writes back to the Contact Record and CRM | Does not write back to the Contact Record, but does write back to CRM |
| Can build audience groups based on survey results |
Results not visible in campaign |
| Can be a normal survey type or an e-learning survey | Only one survey type. |
| 10 question types | 11 question types |
| Can have notification on completion of survey and notifications based on survey question/answers | Has no notification options |
| Can have Page Conditions | Can have Page Conditions |
| Can pre-populate and update fields in GatorMail and CRM | Can pre-populate fields but have to use gsv strings. Also won't update Contact Record Fields. |
| Can use CSS style templates and HTML customisation | Allows limited HTML customisation |
| Can be used directly in Workflow | Cannot be directly used in Workflow |
| Can have a Date & Time question option | Can have either a Date or Time question option |
| To put a survey on a website it must be anonymous. | Can be an anonymous or named survey |
| Field Validation is enabled for fields such as 'Email' | No Field Validation Enabled |
| Fields can be set as Read Only to protect content from being changed | Read Only function not available |
If you need any further advice or guidance on which Survey tool to use for your purposes then please speak to your Account Manager or one of our Support team Members.