© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 1 / 17
How to Embed a Survey in an Email Newsletter (Using Google Forms)
by Gill Andrews
(read this post in a browser)
Table of Contents
5 and 1/2 easy steps to embed a survey in your email newsletter using Google
Forms ..................................................................................................................... 3
Step 1: Create a survey using Google Forms. ...................................................... 4
Step 2: Send the survey to your Gmail account................................................... 4
Step 3: Obtain HTML code for your survey ......................................................... 5
Step 4: Prepare the code for the survey for your newsletter .............................. 6
Step 5: Insert the survey in your newsletter ....................................................... 8
Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional) .................................. 10
Summary ............................................................................................................. 12
Bonus tip #1: How to embed a survey in a blog post ........................................... 13
Bonus tip #2: 3 surefire ways to get more responses to your survey ................... 14
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 2 / 17
Two days ago, I learned something shocking: Turns out, the Internet
doesn’t have all the answers!
I promised a friend to teach her how to embed a survey in an email
newsletter so that people could answer the questions right from their
email.
Response rate for surveys sucks big time. People are just too busy to
click on a link, open a browser, wait for the page to load, etc.
So if you want to increase your chances to get a response to a survey,
you need to make it as easy as possible to answer.
And what can be easier than checking off a couple of boxes straight
from your email?
I knew it was possible to embed a survey using Google Forms in a
single email. But after I spent half an hour researching, I couldn’t
believe it:
The internet was telling me that there is no free, quick & easy way to
embed a survey in a newsletter!
First, I was shocked. Will I have to break my promise?
And then I thought: Really, internet? You can insert this thing in a
single email, but you can’t insert it in a newsletter? This can’t be right.
So I set down, spent a couple of hours and figured out how to do it.
May I present you: The information that you won’t find anywhere else
online.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 3 / 17
5 and 1/2 easy steps to embed a survey
in your email newsletter using Google
Forms
After you follow these steps, all of your subscribers will be able to see
all the questions and answer options within an email you send them.
Save
When your subscribers open your email newsletter, they will see your survey within the
email.
The subscribers with Gmail/Googlemail addresses will be able to
answer the whole survey within the email. Others will be redirected to
the survey in the browser as soon as they try answering anything.
The content of the newsletter with a survey embedded this way will
also pass all the spam filters and will reach all of your subscribers,
given your other settings are in order.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 4 / 17
Step 1: Create a survey using Google Forms.
Google Forms is a free tool for creating forms of any kind, including
surveys, that comes with your Gmail account. It is very intuitive, and
you can start using it right away, even if you’ve never seen it before. If
you need a tutorial on Google Forms, check out this article.
Step 2: Send the survey to your Gmail account.
Once you are happy with your survey, click a “Send” button in the
right top corner.
Google Forms offers an option to embed a survey in an email.
However, you can only send it from your own Gmail account. And who
wants to send email newsletters from a Gmail account? (Correct
answer: No one, because it would be flagged as spam and will
probably not reach your subscribers at all).
So in this step, send the survey to your own Gmail account. Make sure
you check the “Include form in Email” box:
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 5 / 17
Step #2: Send an embedded survey to your own Gmail address.
In the next steps, we will steal, I mean, obtain in a totally legal,
although sneaky, way the code for the survey from the email with the
survey you just sent yourself and paste it in your email newsletter
using whatever software you are using for it (insert evil laughter
here).
Step 3: Obtain HTML code for your survey
Check your inbox and open a message with the survey. Click on More -
> Show original
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 6 / 17
Step #3: Obtain HTML code for the survey.
A new tab will open. Scroll to the bottom and find the link “Download
original”. Click on it and save the file (original_msg.txt) to your
hard drive. This is the file that, among other things, contains the code
for your survey.
Step 4: Prepare the code for the survey for your newsletter
Even if you don’t know HTML (or even if you are a bit afraid of it),
don’t worry. In this step, you need to do a couple of simple search-
and-replace operations. And I made a ton of screenshots to show you
exactly how to do it.
Here’s what you do:
Open the document you just saved (original_msg.txt) in Word. Using
the Find & Replace function make the following replacements:
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 7 / 17
1) Remove all occurences of =^p (this will remove a line break after
“=”, together with “=”)
2) Remove all occurences of 3D
3) Remove empty lines by replacing ^p^p with ^p
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 8 / 17
4) Find the first occurrence of <table and remove all the text above
it.
5) Find the occurence of </body (it will be the only one) and remove
it, together with everything after it till the end of the document.
Great! Now your survey is ready to be pasted in your newsletter.
Step 5: Insert the survey in your newsletter
Start creating your newsletter as usual using an email marketing
software of your choice (I use MailerLite). When it’s time to insert the
survey, copy-paste the code from Step 4. Make sure you paste it using
the “Insert source code” functionality, and don’t paste is as a plain
text.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 9 / 17
Insert your code as a source code, not as a plain text.
At this point, your survey has been successfully inserted in your email
newsletter and you should be able to preview it.
Save
Cool! Your survey is now a part of your email newsletter!
If you send it the way it is right now, your subscribers will be able to
answer it.
Yet, in my opinion, it has too much unnecessary information that
Google has automatically inserted.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 10 / 17
Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional)
If you know HTML and CSS, sky is your limit. You can style your survey
the way you want by changing the source code you’ve just pasted
accordingly.
If you are not comfortable with HTML/CSS, you can still remove some
things that Google has automatically inserted by simply selecting the
elements and pressing DEL.
To do that, select the elements you’d like to remove and press DEL. I
would delete everything before the title of the survey:
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 11 / 17
…and after the “Submit” button:
…so that when your subscribers open their emails, the survey would
something like this:
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 12 / 17
When your subscribers open your email newsletter, they will see your survey within the
email.
Is it cool, or what?
Here’s again the summary of the steps to embed a survey in an email
newsletter:
Summary
Step #1: Create a survey using Google Forms.
Step #2: Send the survey within an email to your Gmail account.
Step #3: Obtain HTML source code for the survey from that email.
Step #4: Prepare the code for the newsletter by:
• Remove all occurrences of 3D
• Remove all occurrences of =^p
• Remove all empty lines
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 13 / 17
• Find the first occurrence of <table and remove everything
before it
• Find the occurrence of </body and remove it together with
everything after it
Step #5: Paste the survey code into your newsletter.
Step #5 1/2: (Optional) Remove the unnecessary elements by
selecting them and pressing DEL and/or style your survey using CSS.
Now you can make it easier for your subscribers to answer your
questions and start learning about the problems of your audience.
You can even use it, for example, to conduct quick polls or let your
subscribers vote on a topic for your next newsletter!
Bonus tip #1: How to embed a survey
in a blog post
Did you know that you can also embed a survey in a blog post? You
can do it in 2 different ways:
1) You can use the “Embedded HTML” option Google Forms provide
on their website: After you’ve created your survey, click “Send”, then
“<>” and copy-paste the code into your blog post.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 14 / 17
Copy-paste this code into your blog post to embed the survey.
Sadly, you can’t use the same code for your email newsletter, because
it contains an iframe element that spam filters won’t let pass
through. But hey, it works for embedding a survey in your blog post!
2) Or you can paste the same code you used in your email newsletter
into your blog post.
Bonus tip #2: 3 surefire ways to get
more responses to your survey
Let’s be honest: The response rates for surveys aren’t great. You are
asking people to stop what they are doing and spend their valuable
time doing you a favor instead.
When you embed your survey in your email newsletter, you’ll already
increased your chances for an answer. But you shouldn’t stop there.
Here are 3 surefire ways to get more people to answer your survey.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 15 / 17
1. Send the survey once again to those who haven’t opened the email.
After a week, check with your email marketing software and
identify the people who haven’t opened the email the first time and
send them the survey again:
• Identify the subscribers that haven’t opened your survey. In
MailerLite, for example, you’ll find this information under
“Campaigns -> Sent -> (Corresponding campaign with the survey)
-> View report -> Show: Not opened”.
• Copy those subscribers in a separate group you’ll create just
for the purpose of sending the survey one more time. In
MailerLite, select Actions -> Copy to group
• Send them the survey once again but with the different
subject to try and catch their attention this time.
2. Embed the survey in a popular blog post
If you have a blog post that gets a lot of traffic and that is relevant to
your survey, embed the survey in that post. See “Bonus tip #1” for the
instructions.
You can see this trick in action here, at the end of the same page
you’ve downloaded this PDF from.
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 16 / 17
3. Embed the survey on your “thank you” page
If you don't have one yet, create a "thank you" page that everyone
who subscribes to your newsletter sees. You can do this by specify
the page you’d like your new subscribers to be redirected after they
confirm their email address in your email marketing software.
In MailerLite, for example, you’ll find it under Forms -> (Correspondent
form) -> Edit -> Confirmation Thank You Page.
Embed your survey there and ask that new subscriber to answer it.
Make sure it’s a short survey though, up to 3 short questions. The
more questions you have, the less people will answer it.
I used to have a survey like that on my "thank you" page, which
looked like this:
© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 17 / 17
Now I have a different “thank you” page because I got enough
answers to the survey.
Hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions, just drop me
a line.
Warm greetings from Germany,
Gill
Gill Andrews A versatile content creator and web consultant who turns
underperforming websites into slick lead generating machines. Follow
Gill on Twitter.
P.S. Do you have a website? Then you may find these free resources
helpful as well:
1. Quiz: How good is your homepage? This quiz doesn’t mess
around. Answer these 20 questions to get ultra-specific
suggestions on how to improve your homepage to grow your
audience and get more leads.
2. Ultimate website checklist 2018: 200+ components of a
successful website at one glance. Unlike other checklists, this
checklist isn’t a collection of single tips but is based on a 4-step
strategy of how to win more clients / customers through your
website.
3. Website content checklist for small businesses. Not sure what
to put on your homepage? Tired of rewriting your About page?
Agonizing over your Services page? Use this checklist to know what
to write on every page (and how).