I want to distribute my survey by myself (not via Qualtrics)

Question

I want to send a survey link on my own (using my email account), i.e.,  I don't want to send it using the 'Distribution' feature from with Qualtrics. 
If I send the link externally to Qualtrics, will Qualtrics be able to collect the survey responses? And does Qualtrics do that automatically?

Also, what are the advantages (if any) of distributing a survey via 'Distribution' from within Qualtrics -- as opposed to just sending it by yourself  (external to Qualtrics)?
Thanks.

MichelleC · Accepted Answer

@Sau_Chee  you can definitely send personal (individualized) links from Qualtrics using your own email account. To start, you must have a Contact list setup within Qualtrics.In your Distributions tab, click Personal Links, Create Links and then select the contact list you want to use. Qualtrics creates an Excel spreadsheet with your users' emails and a personal link that is tied to their name in Qualtrics.At this point, you'd want to save your Excel spreadsheet and then use Word to create a mail merge email.  The emails sent in this way are coming right from your email account, but any responses to the clicked links in the email are tied to the individual users in your contact list, with all the benefits of being able to track who has or has not completed your survey.There's some good information here on personal links in the Qualtrics Help docs:https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/distributions-module/email-distribution/personal-links/and here is some information on how to use Word to create a mail merge:https://support.office.com/en-us/article/mail-merge-using-an-excel-spreadsheet-858c7d7f-5cc0-4ba1-9a7b-0a948fa3d7d3One of the benefits of sending from the Qualtrics mailer itself is just general ease-of-use. It's so simple. The benefit to using your own email platform is that your email is less likely to get snagged/stamped as spam by your recipient's email system since the server the email is coming from is a No-Reply server and the From address doesn't match your email name.I hope this helps!

Michael_Campbell_RedPepper · Answer

Distributions give you the added advantage of creating batches based on day you already have on a respondent.  Let's say that you have a list of customers who gave you negative feedback on a survey, or they ordered a specific product.  You can use Qualtrics to group them up into a Distribution and shoot them all the same survey, or link pieces of data (such as the ID of the product they gave you, or anything really) and it will be stored in that Survey they take.  You can then use that within the survey to customize their experience. Also, their identity will be tied to the survey, so you can know exactly what they said (rather than receive anonymous responses.And with distribution lists, you can have things called Webhooks fire off a survey.  They're technical to implement in certain cases, but Qualtrics makes it easier than most platforms.  The way a Webhooks works is that a Web service (such as an online store, a payment collection service, etc) can 'fire off a signal' to Qualtrics, and that will trigger a survey to be sent to the customer.But if you don't need any of those and it's simpler to email out a link, you can go to the 'Distribution' tab of the Survey Editor, and get various types of links to send.  You can make the responses anonymous, require sign in, or even limit their responses to a single response per respondent.  If you have a mass emailer, you could throw the link in and shoot it off, no problem!So it all depends on how specific or general you need your responses to be!

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