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We get a lot of requests here to build survey tools. However, as much as we love the calls to develop our own application, it certainly appears to be an uphill battle when powerful form-builders like Wufoo are doing the job exceptionally well already. What's better, Wufoo synchronizes quite happily with Campaign Monitor and you can even conditionally add signups to your subscriber list. What's not to love?

In this article, we'll look at how you can optimize your surveys to play swell with your email campaigns. Finally, we'll look at inventive uses for Wufoo forms.

Why should I be using Wufoo for surveys?

Well, I've scoped out a couple of survey apps in my time doing gumshoe work as an email marketer and I can confidently say Wufoo is one of the most pleasurable to work with.

Sure, Wufoo isn't for everyone - it doesn't have the sort of "If Question x is y, then skip to Question z" -type logic that many marketers consider to be essential. Plus, the in-app humor and toy-shop color scheme may not give it the appearance of a serious tool, but hear it out - it is. Depending on your pricing plan, you can collect up to 100,000 entries a month, have up to 60 users manage your account and even securely process payments. Plus its Report Manager not only does a great job at crunching the results, but downright looks good.

How can I get my email campaign to play nice with Wufoo?

Once you've created a survey, here are some simple techniques to help you make the most out Wufoo's features:

Conditionally sync entries with your subscriber list

Using Notifications, you can sync the names and email addresses collected from your Wufoo form with your Campaign Monitor subscriber list. What's better, you can do so conditionally, meaning that subscribers are required to tick an opt-in box before they get added to your list. There's your permission troubles put to rest in one - pretty cool, hey?

Automatically populate fields with subscriber info

If you're pointing your subscribers to a Wufoo survey, there's no point getting them to fill in information that you already have on record, like their email address. The good news is that Wufoo allows you to dynamically populate forms. Say you have an 'email address' field and a 'Favorite widget' custom field in your subscriber list. To embed these values into your email, you would use some code like this:

Hi, friend! Your email address is [email] and your favorite widget is a [Favoritewidget, fallback=gewgaw].

In your sent campaign, this would look something like:

Hi, friend! Your email address is widgets@widgetfan.com and your favorite widget is a detector.

So far, so good, right? To pass these values on to your form, Wufoo uses a technique called URL modification. Using Wufoo's API information, you can link fields in your subscriber list to fields in your survey form. Here's an example of a link that allows you to do just that:

To take our survey, <a href="http://youraccount.wufoo.com/forms/ yourform/def/field123=[email]&field456=[Favoritewidget, fallback=gewgaw]">click here</a>

Where field123 and field456 are defined in your API information. When you click on the link, you will see that your 'Your favorite widget is a:' and 'Email:' fields have already been filled:

Use hidden fields for email addresses and tracking

So you may be thinking, "If I have this information on file, then why display it at all?". Going back to our previous example, lets say that we wanted to add your subscribers' email addresses to your survey for tracking purposes, but hide the email address field. No problem. The link would remain in the same format:

To take our survey, <a href="http://youraccount.wufoo.com/forms/ yourform/def/field123=[email]">click here</a>

In Wufoo, simply go to your Form Builder, and add 'hide' to 'Add CSS Layout Keywords' in your Email field:

Just like that, your email field vanishes into thin air (well, not really):

However the email addresses passed to the form will still be recorded by Wufoo.

Inventive uses for Wufoo

Now you've mastered some of the techniques in setting up an email-friendly survey, what else can you do with Wufoo? Here are two suggestions:

Alternative signup forms

If you're only interested in populating your subscriber list with names and email addresses, an embedded or standalone Wufoo form is an elegant way to collect signups and perhaps a little more information on the side. Here's an example of a competition signup form:

Note that we've added an opt-in checkbox to this form - if the "I wish to receive ABC Widgets' monthly email newsletter" checkbox has been defined as a signup condition, the person's details won't be synced with your subscriber list unless its been ticked.

Exit surveys

We're often asked to add optional 'Why did you unsubscribe?' -type surveys to our one-click unsubscribe process. In so much as we don't believe in making the act of unsubscribing any longer than instant for your subscribers, there's nothing wrong with including an exit survey in, or as your unsubscribe confirmation page:

If this sounds familiar, it's because we've blogged about it before - give this post a read for inspiration on how to say sayonara with style.

Wufoo and Campaign Monitor are a great match if you're looking for a quick and simple way to create a survey and collect email signups. Let us know about your experiences with Wufoo and other survey apps - sometimes the right tool for the job is right under your nose.

We recently did a round of testing with the help of the Typekit team to see if there was a viable way to get @font-face working in popular email clients. Given the rate of image blocking in email, @font-face support would be an awesome technique to style the text in your email without the need for images.

Imagine sending an email like the one above that rendered like this in popular email clients even with images disabled.

How we tested

For testing purposes, we tried the following @font-face techniques:

1. Traditional method of declaring the @font-face and the element to use that font family in <style> in the <head>
2. Declared the font-face in <style> in the <head> and then called it inline using style="font-family:..."
3. Declared the font-face in the <style> in the <head> and <body> using encoded data URIs and used the 2 combinations above to tie it to an element.

Because of the syntax of @font-face, there is no way to embed a font inline using src: url("...").

The results

Desktop email clients	Result
Apple Mail	Font renders
Entourage 2008	Fallback font displayed
Lotus Notes 6, 7 and 8.5	Fallback font displayed
Outlook 2007	Fallback font displayed
Outlook 2003	Fallback font displayed
Thunderbird	Fallback font displayed
Windows Mail	Fallback font displayed
Web-based email clients	Result
AOL Web	Fallback font displayed
Gmail	Fallback font displayed
Hotmail	Fallback font displayed
MobileMe	Fallback font displayed
MySpace	Fallback font displayed
Mobile email clients	Result
iPhone	Font renders

Unfortunately, the embedded font only rendered in Apple Mail 3 and 4, plus the iPhone. None of the other dektop email clients came to the party. On the web-based side, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail stripped the @font-face CSS from the email automatically. Because it isn't possible to actually move @font-face inline, and all email clients strip JavaScript by default, it looks to be impossible to get @font-face to render across all the popular email clients.

We'll be keeping a sharp eye on how @font-face and other style rules shape up in the future - until then, it's better to stick to the web fonts you love and know. Of course, if you use our email client reports and a large percentage of your subscribers use Apple Mail and the iPhone, this might be a cool way to add some extra flair to your next email design.

Immediately after Gmail Labs announced that you can now preview YouTube clips from within Gmail's reading pane, we started pondering on how our customers could make best use of this feature. As a few of you have expressed interest in segmenting subscriber lists by email client, lets talk about how to create a segment for Gmail users. Finally, as with many email techniques, there's an important caveat - targeting subscribers by email client is certainly not an exact science.

Previewing video in Gmail: The basics

With Gmail's new YouTube Previews feature, Gmail users can now view YouTube videos from within Gmail itself, instead of clicking away from the Gmail inbox. If an email is received with a text-link to a YouTube video, a preview is shown directly after the message. Recipients can then click the play button and view the video, as if it were embedded in the footer of the email.

This is great for senders with Gmail users subscribed to their lists, as it means one less reason for folks to navigate away from your email. However, as we'll discuss later in this post, targeting Gmail users certainly isn't a foolproof tactic.

How to target Gmail users in your lists

In this example, we will be creating a segment for Gmail users by targeting subscribers by the domain, "@gmail.com".

In your account, navigate to the subscriber list which you wish to segment. Click, 'Segments', then create a new segment. The first rule of your segment should be, 'Email Address'. Add rule. On the next screen, select 'Contains' from the drop-down under the header, 'Email Address' and type, "@gmail.com".

Click 'Save and refresh count' to view the number of active subscribers in the segment:

You can now send your campaigns to this segment, just as you would any old subscriber list. Learn more about creating and using segments.

Why this technique may not work

As Mark Brownlow pointed out in his excellent article, "Video in Gmail", segmenting by domain isn't a particularly accurate way to pinpoint who actually reads their email in Gmail itself. Commonly, folks use other email clients like Outlook to view emails received by their Gmail accounts; I personally have my Gmail account forward messages to another address, which I then view in Apple Mail. In these instances, the YouTube preview will not display in your alternate email client.

That said, it is certainly more likely that you will be sending to folks who will view your newsletter in Gmail, so it's certainly worth an experiment to see if a Gmail segment responds to your message differently from the rest of the pack. You could create a Gmail segment and a non-Gmail segment, send a campaign with a YouTube Preview link to each separately, then compare results.

A second consideration is that the YouTube Previews section of an email is both fairly subtle and after a few paragraphs of text, quickly disappears under the fold. If you want to make your video one of the focal elements of your email, be sure to go light on the content. Secondly, don't assume it's going to display - adding a call-to-action like "View video below" is certainly a recipe for confusion for any subscriber using a client outside of Gmail.

Mark also has some useful observations regarding embedding YouTube links in email (for example, our tracking links will disable the preview in certain circumstances), so visit his blog for the full story on YouTube Previews.

Hopefully this move by Gmail will apply pressure on other email clients to support the playback of video internally. Embedding video in a secure, non-destructive manner is a positive move and will hopefully lead to a richer, more interactive email experience for everybody.

Have you given the new YouTube Previews feature a shot in your campaigns? Please share your impressions - positive or negative - in the comments below. We'd love to know whether video in email is something you and your subscribers find to be beneficial.