• Customer Experience
    Customer Experience
  • Employee Experience
    Employee Experience
  • Brand Experience
    Brand Experience
  • Product Experience
    Product Experience
  • Core XM
    Core XM

Step 4: Distributing a Survey or Email Campaign

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Qtip: XM Directory is an improvement upon the old Target Audience, with user interface (UI) changes made to integrate more seamlessly with the XM platform. If you do not have XM Directory and would like to purchase access, contact your Account Executive.
Once you create a survey and set up your mailing lists, it’s time to send out some survey invites! XM Directory gives you all kinds of options for distributing mailings.

Qtip: If you’d like help setting up your survey, check out our Survey Platform support pages. Otherwise, if you’re ready to start distributing, read on!

Sending Survey Invites

XM Directory allows you to send surveys and emails directly through the Directories page, so you do not need to switch between XM Directory and the Survey Platform every time you want to send an invite.

Qtip: Prefer to use your own mailer? XM Directory also allows you to download a list of survey links that can be sent through your own email server.

To get started on your survey invite, go to the Distributions tab and select New Distribution. In this invite, you will have power over when your distribution goes out, whether the respondents’ personal information is recorded, whether the respondent can retake the survey, and more.

Qtip: See Send Emails in XM Directory for more details.

Distributions tab

XM Directory also allows you to send emails without a survey. This can be useful for email campaigns, announcements, or general information emails. However, these types of emails do not support reminder or thank you emails.

Attention: The more you contact your users with things that disinterest them, the more likely they are to opt out of ALL of our mailings. It’s important to only send a non-invite email if it has a purpose or a benefit for the customer. Furthermore, you may be subject to GDPR compliance. If you are worried about your Qualtrics users sending too many non-invites, try implementing Contact Frequency Rules.

Managing Past Distributions

In the Distributions tab, you will see a list of all distributions that have been sent from your account. By clicking on a specific distribution, you can see statistics about the distribution. This includes the size of the list, how many emails were sent, and how many surveys were completed.

Info on distributions opens on right

You will also have additional Actions you can place on the distribution. You can view or delete the distribution, or download a CSV file that contains the entire list of contacts in the distribution, their status, and their individual survey link.

In that Actions dropdown, you also have an option to send a Reminder or Thank You email. A reminder email is sent after an initial invite, asking respondents who have not finished the survey to complete it. This reminder email will go out to respondents who have started the survey but not submitted it, as well as respondents who have not yet started the survey.

Reminder and thank you options

We recommend sending reminder emails between three to seven days after the initial distribution. Thank you emails can be sent as well thanking respondents for completing the survey, and we recommend sending these between three to seven days after the distribution as well. That will give most respondents time to complete the survey and ensures that the thank you email comes in a timely enough manner.