Emailing Survey Invitations and Reminders

Last updated: 8 October, 202613 min read

PaperSurvey can email each person on your list their own personalised survey link, and then remind the people who have not answered. The mail is sent through your own email provider, so invitations arrive from your address and your domain, and your recipient list never passes through our sending infrastructure.

Email sending is available on Enterprise plans and above. On other plans you can still generate personalised links in bulk and send them yourself.

Before you start

Enable web surveys for the survey in its settings.
Unique Page Marking must be active for the survey, since each link is tied to a uniquely identified copy.
Upload your list to Prefill Forms, one row per person, with a column holding the email address.
Have your mail provider's SMTP details to hand. Nearly every provider gives you these.

Proton Mail is the one common exception: its Bridge runs on your own computer and cannot be reached from our servers, so you need a Proton Business account with SMTP submission rather than the Bridge.

Connecting your email provider

Go to Settings, then Email Sending. This is available to team managers.
Pick your provider from the list, which fills in the server and port for you, or choose Other or self-hosted.
Enter the username and password your provider gave you. A few provider-specific notes:
- Postmark uses your Server API token as both the username and the password. Invitations are bulk, so use a Broadcast stream token.
- Brevo and Mailjet each issue a separate SMTP key, which is not the same as your API key.
- Google Workspace needs a 16-character App Password, which requires 2-Step Verification. Your normal password will be refused.
- Amazon SES needs SES SMTP credentials, which are not your AWS access keys, and they only work in the region that issued them.
- Microsoft 365 needs SMTP AUTH enabled for both the mailbox and the tenant, and Microsoft is switching password-based SMTP off by default.
- Resend uses the literal word resend as the username and your API key as the password.

The list is split into two groups. Sending services such as Postmark, Brevo, Mailjet, Mailgun, Amazon SES, SMTP2GO and MailerSend are built for campaigns and will handle a large list. Mailbox providers such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoho, Fastmail and iCloud are fine for a few hundred people but throttle heavily beyond that, because they were designed for a person writing to a person.

If you need your mail to stay in the EU, Brevo, Mailjet, MailerSend, Mailgun's EU region, SMTP2GO's EU hosts and Amazon SES's EU regions all offer that. Infomaniak is Swiss, which is an adequacy-decision country rather than an EU member. 4. Set the From address and From name your recipients will see, and optionally a reply-to address. 5. Enter a postal address. This appears in the footer of every invitation. Anti-spam law requires a physical address on email sent to people who are not your own users. 6. Save, then press Send test email. A test message goes to your own address. Nothing can be sent to a list until that test succeeds.

Your password is stored encrypted and is never shown again. To change it, type a new one over the top. Leaving the field blank keeps the password you already saved.

Sending invitations

Open your prefill list and select the rows you want to invite.
Open the menu next to the Print button and choose Generate links to web survey.
Choose Send by email instead.
Pick the survey, then pick which column holds the email address.
Write your subject and message. Use {{Survey Link}} where the person's own link should go, and any column name in braces for personalisation, for example {{First Name}}. A preview under the message shows exactly what your recipients will see.
Optionally set an expiry date after which the links stop accepting responses. Each person's link is normally the same one that earlier campaigns and link downloads for their row gave them, so the expiry you choose here replaces the one the link had before, and leaving it empty means the link does not expire.
Press Continue. PaperSurvey builds the list and shows you what will happen before anything is sent: how many people will be invited, and how many were skipped because the address was missing, invalid or listed twice, because another row has the same ID, because they have already responded, because they unsubscribed from an earlier campaign, or because your mail server refused their address in an earlier campaign.
Press Send invitations.

Someone counts as having responded when their survey has been submitted, on the web or as a returned paper form printed from the same list. A skipped row is left exactly as it was: nothing in an earlier answer is changed, and apart from the rare case below, no link is created for it. So you can select your whole list and let PaperSurvey leave out the people who have already answered.

Each person's link belongs to their row's ID, if your list has an ID column. Two people whose rows have the same ID, such as a household ID or a row entered twice, would be sent one shared link, with one person's details filled in for the other. So only the first of those rows is invited, and the others are counted as skipped. Give each person their own ID to invite them all. A row whose ID cell is empty does not share an ID with anyone, and gets a link of its own.

In one rare case neither row is invited. A row without an ID is given a new one when its link is created, such as WEB_42. If another row you selected already has WEB_42 in its ID column, the two would share that link, so both are counted as skipped. By then the link has been created, but it is not sent to anyone.

Surveys that accept several responses from the same link work differently, because they are made for repeated rounds such as a monthly check-in. An answer to an earlier round does not skip anyone, so a new campaign invites them again. Only an answer given after someone was added to this campaign counts as a response to it. Someone whose earlier form from this list was printed on paper and returned is sent a new link of their own, filled in from your list, because their usual link is that paper form. The paper form's answers are left exactly as they were, and later campaigns send the same new link. People who share an ID whose form has been returned are each sent a new link of their own in the same way.

A send that is interrupted and resumed carries on from where it stopped.

Formatting your message

The message supports a small amount of markdown, and the toolbar above the box inserts it for you:

**bold** and *italic*
#, ## and ### for headings
- for a bulleted list, 1. for a numbered list
[Take the survey](https://example.org) for a link with your own wording
--- on its own line for a horizontal rule

A labelled link is usually worth more than a bare URL. "Take the survey" reads better than a long address, and it is the single biggest thing you can change to improve your response rate.

Invitations deliberately do not support images, colours, highlights, font sizes or tables. That is not an omission. Mail apps block images by default for a sender the recipient has never heard from, so an invitation whose call to action is an image has no visible call to action at all, and a heavy, image-led message is the exact shape spam filters score against. Since you are sending on your own mail server, with your own reputation, that matters more here than it would on ours.

If you paste something that is not supported, the preview tells you what was dropped. Your words are always kept, only the formatting goes.

Reminders

When composing, switch on Remind people who have not responded. You can add up to three reminders, each set to a number of days after the invitation.

A few things worth knowing about how reminders behave:

Every reminder counts from that person's own invitation, not from when the campaign started and not from the reminder before it. Reminders set to 3 and 7 days go out on day 3 and day 7. Someone first reached on day two gets their three-day reminder on day five.
Reminders go out at the hour you choose, in your team's timezone, and the days are calendar days there. A reminder goes out at that hour on the day it falls due, whatever time of day the invitation was sent, as long as at least 12 hours have passed since that person's previous message. If they have not, for example after an invitation sent late in the evening with an early send hour, the reminder goes out at the same hour the next day. Survey respondents do not have a timezone in PaperSurvey, so the time is yours rather than theirs.
Whether someone has responded is read from the survey data itself, not from whether they opened the email. That includes a returned paper form printed from the same list, and it is checked again just before each message is sent. Someone who answers on day two simply drops out of every later wave.
A reminder is never the first thing someone receives. If the original invitation never reached them, they are not sent a reminder pretending it did.
Nobody receives two reminders on the same day. If someone's earlier reminder went out late, the next one waits at least a day.
Reminders stop on their own when someone responds or unsubscribes, when your mail server refuses their address, and when you close the survey or cancel the campaign.

What your recipients see

Every invitation and reminder carries an unsubscribe link, and a one-click unsubscribe header that mail apps can act on directly. Unsubscribing stops all later reminders for that campaign, and that person is skipped automatically the next time your team builds a list.

Unsubscribing from your survey affects only your team's campaigns. It does not affect any other organisation using PaperSurvey.

If something goes wrong

If your mail server refuses to send at all, for example because it rejected the password, the From address or the encryption setting, PaperSurvey stops the whole campaign rather than working through the rest of your list. It keeps an exact record of who was already reached, so you can fix the problem and resume from where it stopped.

A problem with one address does not stop the campaign:

An address your mail server says does not exist is marked as bounced. That person is not tried again in this campaign, and is skipped in your team's later campaigns. This only happens once your server has delivered at least one message in the campaign, so a server that refuses every address cannot mark your whole list as bounced. Until then, a refused address is treated as a temporary failure and tried again.
A temporary failure, such as a busy server or one that asks senders to try again later, is retried automatically, up to three attempts in all. An invitation is retried after at least 15 minutes, and a reminder at the next send time.
If ten messages in a row fail temporarily, or 25 addresses in a row are refused, the campaign pauses in case the problem is with the server rather than the addresses. Check with your mail provider, then resume the campaign.
When you resume, everyone who has not been tried yet is sent to first, and the people whose messages failed are retried after them. Retries that keep failing do not pause the campaign again. They stop after three attempts in all, and everyone else's reminders carry on.

Bounce messages that arrive later in your own mailbox are not tracked, because they go to your mail server rather than to PaperSurvey.

A campaign also pauses itself when something needs your attention before it can carry on, and tells you why. That happens when the survey is closed, moved to the trash or has web surveys switched off, and when your mail server settings have changed and have not been tested yet. Put it right, then resume the campaign. A reminder that falls due while one of these is unresolved waits, and goes out at the next send time after it is fixed.

Whenever a campaign pauses or stops by itself, PaperSurvey emails the person who started it with the reason, or the team owner if that person has left the team. You can then find the campaign under Email campaigns on the list it was sent from.

You can pause a campaign yourself while it is sending or waiting to send reminders, and resume it later. Nothing is sent while it is paused. When you resume, anyone who has responded in the meantime is left out, invitations that had not gone out yet are sent straight away, and reminders that fell due during the pause go out at the next send time. Cancelling a campaign is final.

Once a campaign's links expire, nothing more is sent, because every link would open an expired page, and the campaign says so. A single link that has already expired, for example because a later link download for the same row gave it an earlier date, is not sent either, and the rest of the campaign carries on.

The most common causes of a rejected message:

The username or password was rejected. Re-enter the password. Providers that use API tokens often expect the token in both fields.
The server refused to relay. Your From address usually has to belong to the account you authenticated with.
The encryption setting does not match. Try the other option, or the other port. STARTTLS normally goes with port 587, and SSL/TLS with 465.
The server could not be reached. Check the host and port, and whether your provider restricts sending to certain networks.