© 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.

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1. Quiz: How good is your homepage? This quiz doesn’t mess

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