Generate E-mail Surveys in Minutes

E-mail based questionnaires and surveys help a lot in gathering views of your
target audience for better decision making. Tools that assist you to quickly
create the questionnaire and send it across to your target audience can be of
great help in such scenarios. E-mail Questionnaire by CompressWeb allows you to
do these tasks while easily integrating with mail clients like Outlook, Outlook
Express and Eudora. This way you can quickly add recipients and send the
questionnaire, all from a single interface. It does not require setting up any
Web server for creating, sending and maintaining your questionnaire, and
provides a library of questions for standard questionnaire scenarios such as
Annual HR reviews, etc. Here's a sneak peek into how to use this tool.

Getting started

Download and install the software from the site mentioned. The options dialog
opens automatically on first run. Expanding the Mail Settings node opens three
nodes-one each for Outgoing Mail, Incoming Mail and Mail Add-ins. For the
outgoing mail server, give the 'Sender E mail Address', and then choose from
the options of 'Use Default Exchange Server Setting', or 'Use SMTP Server'.
The first option auto-detects your Exchange Server settings. With the second
option, you need to provide SMTP server name/ IP Address and other standard
options such as port no (default is 25), user ID and password in case your SMTP
server requires authentication.

The page with 'Incoming Mail' option contain a single option of enabling
POP3 access. Check this option if your mail server allows POP3 access. If you
enable this option, you also need to give the incoming mail server name/ IP
Address, user ID and password. The Mail Add-in page contains three options for
Add-ins. These are the mail clients that you want this software to work with.
Choose the option according to the mail client you use.

Creating questionnaires

This is one place where the tool comes in handy. You don't need to sit down
and frame questions most of the time as it comes with a library of questions
which cover every aspect like e-commerce, education, HR, market, satisfaction
and support. There's also a section for user defined Q&A. To set up a
questionnaire, click on the Questionnaires View. Add questions on the page that
appears on right hand side by right clicking on the page1 node in the
questionnaire tree. Now choose Question option to manually edit one and mark
properties such as whether the question is optional or compulsory.

Set up mail server configuration for the mail account to be used for sending out questionnaires

Manually edit questions or choose from the available library to complete the questionnaire page

Add Recipients for the questionnaire quickly by choosing addresses from your existing address book

Follow up on the mailed questionnaire using the report view that summarizes the replies for speedy reference and analyses

To use the existing library, click on the 'Questions Library' option
after right clicking on the page node. Open the 'Send Mode' dialog through
Form > Send menu option after you have filled in all the questions required.
Click on the 'Recipients' link to open the recipients page on the dialog.
The page provides buttons for choosing the data source for importing addresses.
You can import from Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora and CSV files. We had
chosen Outlook. This opens the Outlook contacts from where you can select the
recipients. Click on Ok to complete; the tool starts sending the questionnaire
straight away.

To follow up on the questionnaire, go to the Report view which displays the
data in a report format indicating details such as number of replies to a
particular option in the questionnaire, and percentage wise distribution of each
reply.



The tool is very easy to use and provides all the options that one would need to
create, send and follow up on the mail questionnaire, what more! You don't
need to set up any server for all this. Your existing Exchange or POP3/SMTP
server is enough. And if that is not enough, you can even set the start and end
date and time for your questionnaire. A must have if you run into creating
questionnaires for surveys quickly and can't manually track down replies.

It is not just the desktop based mail client, and exchange servers that the
tool works with readily. It also supports Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. You can
even use this for sending questionnaires from these mail ids as well. The tool
comes in three versions, Standard, Professional, and Enterprise.

Enterprise edition allows you to add unlimited number of recipients to your
surveys and provides more than thirty templates. Go for this version if you have
many workloads related topsurveys- might help in providing some time off from
this schedule!