Email Surveys
Introduction
While we are big believers of in-product surveys, there are many scenarios where email surveys provide a great alternative.
For example, email surveys let you reach users that are currently not connected to your application. Popular use cases include post-purchase satisfaction surveys, abandoned card surveys or subscription cancellation surveys.
On the following pages we’ll cover everything you need to know to send out your first Refiner email surveys.
How Email Surveys work
The most important thing first: Refiner does not send emails on your behalf.
Instead, you’ll be using your current email marketing solution (Mailchimp, Customer.io, Drip, Hubspot, …) to send your email surveys.
Refiner provides a HTML code snippet for your survey which you can embed in your emails.
Your users receives an email coming from you – using your branding and email address – with an embedded email survey as shown in the example above.
The code snippet will render the first question of your survey in your emails. A click on the embedded survey sends respondents to a survey page where they can complete the survey.
Send surveys with your own ESP
There are a number of reasons why sending email surveys using your own Email Service Provider (ESP) makes a lot of sense.
As you likely already use a powerful email sending platform(e.g. HubSpot, Customer.io, Salesforce, …), introducing an additional sending tool only adds operational overhead without clear benefit.
Email delivery itself is a complex problem, and established ESPs have spent years optimizing infrastructure, deliverability, and compliance. It’s more effective to rely on these proven systems than to duplicate that effort.
By using your existing ESP, you can also reuse your current templates, design assets, and contact data. In practice, your workflow stays the same – you simply enhance your emails by embedding surveys.
Refiner’s approach is fully compatible with any email provider that supports inserting custom HTML, so you can integrate surveys without changing your setup.
Capture data from the first click
With embedded email surveys, the first click does more than open the survey—it pre-fills the first question and identifies the respondent. This means you start collecting response data immediately and can attribute each response to a specific user.
To maintain data quality, we automatically filter out non-human clicks generated by email security systems (e.g., anti-phishing or anti-malware scanners). Detection is primarily based on IP analysis. If a click appears suspicious, we won’t pre-fill the first question and will instead wait for a genuine user interaction on the survey page.