NOTE: This option is not available for anonymous link surveys in order to avoid any possibility of passing identifiable customer information as a property via the link.
When a customer accesses your survey by link, you can pass customer properties that will be assigned or updated in the customer's profile in Retently.
To get started, follow the tutorial below.
Create custom properties in Retently
In Retently there are two main categories of customer properties:
Default: these are provided by default by our system (e.g., first name, last name, company name, etc.).
Custom: users can create additional customer properties to store external data in a customer's profile in Retently.
The default properties are:
firstName
lastName
fullName (composed of firstName + lastName)
lastFirstName (composed of lastName + firstName)
companyName
companyIndustry
jobTitle
phoneNumber
If you need to store any other type of data in a property that Retently doesn't provide by default, then you can easily create it as a custom customer property in your account.
Click here to check our tutorial on manually creating custom properties here.
IMPORTANT: If you pass a property in your survey by link that you didn't create yet in your account, our system will create it automatically. When creating the property, our system will try to identify its type (text, number, date), but there is a chance that the property will be identified as a "text" property. Therefore, to make sure that you have full control over your custom properties' type, consider creating them in Retently first, and only after that pass them via your survey links.
When creating a property in Retently, please follow these recommendations:
Avoid spaces in the property's name. Choose the camel-case (yourPropertyName) or snake-case (your_property_name) formats. This will help you make sure that your properties will be correctly identified and updated in Retently.
Make sure to choose the property type (text, number, date) correctly, as it cannot be modified.
Insert properties in the survey link
The next step is to add the properties to your survey link. Start with deciding what properties would you like to collect, these may be default properties or custom ones.
Let's assume that you would like your customers to answer the link survey, and automatically store the customer's personal data, as well as some other properties:
Email address (default property): this is required to identify your customer and automatically import them to Retently, or update their data. Click here to learn more about identifying customers via link surveys.
Full name (default property): use "fullName"
Company name (default property): use "companyNmae"
Subscription name (custom property): recommended name "subscription_name" and type "text"
Signup date (custom property): recommended name "signup_date" and type "date"
When building your link to include all the properties listed above, you will need to add variables as values for each property.
For instance, you might consider sending the survey link via a messaging software, where you store your customers' data. Usually, these services will make data available via variables (also known as "placeholders" or "merge fields").
As an example, for the email address, they might provide you the {{user.email}} variable.
Your final survey link would look like this:
https://cx.retently.com/cl/5fb7ad852fe/{{user.email}}/?fullName={{user.name}}&companyName={{user.company}}&subscription_name={{user.subscription}}&signup_date={{user.signup}}
To explain the structure of the link:
The link starts with some default values generated in your survey campaign in Retently: "
https://cx.retently.com/cl/5fb7ad852fe/". Click here to learn more about link surveys.Then, the link is followed by the email address variable, and should be closed with "
/?". Everything after this will be treated as properties. Example:https://cx.retently.com/cl/5fb7ad852fe/{{user.email}}/?.Finally, you have to query the properties that you want to manage using your link. After each pair of property-value, you have to add "
&" which will help our system separate the properties. Example: "https://cx.retently.com/cl/5fb7ad852fe/{{user.email}}/?fullName={{user.name}}&companyName={{user.company}}".
If you need any help with the setup, reach out to our support team and we will be glad to assist you.
Note:
For the default properties, please follow the template-specific guidelines. Example: In the link you may use "firstName", however in the template it should be "first_name" as this is the format accepted in the templates.
If you use camelCase for custom properties in the survey by link, make sure to use them all in lowercase in your survey template. Example: https://cx.retently.com/cl/5fb7ad852fe/{{user.email}}/?fullName={{user.name}}&productName={{product}}"; In this case in the template the merge field should be "productname".