Product Tips - personalizing your questions

When creating a survey or web form, the more you can personalize the content specifically to your target, the better response you are going to get. Clicktools offers all levels of users the ability to personalize their survey questions.

By including a previous answer to a subsequent question, you can re-enforce the feeling that you know your respondents and are tailoring your services to them. We call this process piping answers into text. The formula is ${question_n} - where 'n' is the question number.

Here's an example:

Here's a simple survey that asks a person to enter their name and then select their favorite color. We can pipe the person's answer from question 1 into questions 2 and 3.

Q1 What is your name?
Q2 Hi ${question_1}, what is your favorite color? [Red, Blue, Green]
Q3 Why is ${question_2} your favourite colour?

If the person enters Sarah as their answer to Q1; Q2 will look like this
'Hi Sarah, what is your favorite color?’

If Sarah then selects Green as her favorite color; Q3 will look like this
'Why is Green your favorite color?'

It is possible to get much more detailed with this process, for example:

Q3 Tell me ${question_1}, why is ${question_2} your favorite color?

It will look like this....'Tell me Sarah, why is Green your favorite color?'

One thing you'll need to remember is that for the answers to appear in a future question, the page must have first refreshed. The easiest way to be certain that this takes place is to display questions in a new section.

Keep following the blog for more tips and tricks.


Rose Cruse
Product Manager