Surveys

[Anonymous]

We are going to be surveying our customers when work is performed. I have looked at the surveymonkey integration, but I'm not sure it is worth the cost for what we want to do. Basically, we will be sending out about 40 survey emails each week. We will need to have some analysis, but I know we can just download the information and make the graphs, etc in excel on a monthly and ongoing basis.

Is there something I'm missing? Is there some feature of the paid surveys that would be worth the price (other than the time it takes to do the analysis when using marketo forms)?

I'm leaning towards using forms and doing the analysis myself. So if you have any insight about why the survey modules would be better I would LOVE to hear it!

[Josh_Hill13]

If you want to tie this data back to your lead records and use the response data easily, then it is worth the money. 40 surveys/week is a lot over time.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

+1. 40 / week is really a lot.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

I was considering using marketo forms, so the information would be tied to the lead records. And then just downloading the updated fields once a month to do the analysis.

I get that 40 a week is a lot, but only having to do the analysis once a month kind of negates the impact of how many total there are. Is there some functionality of the survey module that would be difficult to replicate in excel?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Don't know if I would use Excel -- probably a SQL database -- but I agree that if you're going to crunch everything offline once a month, and you're not trying to do A/B testing or branching within the survey context, you may be able to do this yourself.  Or you could hire somebody to write an analysis package based on API results and still save over the cost of the integration.

That said, the survey specialists always have more exciting visualizations. And your time is still money -- even if it's "only" 10 hours a month you may not be as free as you would want.

I actually think people need to look at forms-as-surveys from a different angle.  Think forms-first and then posting the results to a service that aggregates generic data (not a survey platform but an analytics platform). May blog about this later on.

[Anonymous]

My thoughts exactly, Sanford. I was thinking using forms as receiving the input and then sending the data somewhere else with a webhook, e.g. a php file on our webserver that could send the data back to Marketo as custom an object. Next step would be to generate a webpage, where you can query your data and export it to e.g. Excel for further analysis.

We've created such pages, where we pull all registered people to an event via the API by program ID, so could do the same thing with a survey id/custom object id or the such, where a client can download the data as an Excel file. See example below.

It's not completely safe or locked, but it works for now.