“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time” (Bill Gates – 2004) “Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! …” (Monty Python) There are two spots where your survey invitation email can be held up from arriving in an employee’s inbox:
- At the organization’s email server – if the emails are coming from an external source (ex. “@veritaengage.com”).
- In the email program they use to read their emails (ex. Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.).
Solving the first one: Ask someone in IT to “White list” the email domain (if possible).
When some email servers (the programs that decide which email goes where) receive a large number of emails coming from the same email address over a short period of time, they will block the email address or flag the emails as spam. As you’ll be sending out a number of employee survey invitations all at once, this might be a problem. To get around this, contact the IT department (or whoever is responsible for IT) at the organization being surveyed and ask if they can “white list” the sending invitation email address. (This would be “something@veritaengage.com” in our case.) This tags the emails as “friendly” and creates a free pass to let them through. This is not ALWAYS possible, but it’s worth a shot.
Solving the second one: Make sure that employees are expecting the email so they go looking for it.
There is no way to control how any given email reader on any given computer will treat an incoming email. The indicators they use to decide whether an email is spam or not will be unique to that one computer. What I’m saying then is that SOME of your invitations are going to end up in spam no matter what you do. So make sure that your internal communication is set up so that they are expecting the email – and if it DOES go to spam, they will go looking for it and/or notify you that the invitation hasn’t arrived. A note on business vs personal emails. Business addresses are obviously preferable for a mail out, but many firms have a clause in their hiring agreement that allows emails regarding company business to be sent to a personal address provided by the employee – so you might be able to use that as well if business addresses are unavailable. As always, give us a shout if you have any questions on this, and next up: “Employee Survey Pro Tip Series 14 – Avoiding “Paralysis by Analysis” in question design“[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][mk_content_box heading=”Let’s have a chat!” icon=”mk-moon-bubbles-6″]
