Survey reminders
Survey reminders allow you to send automated emails directly from SurveyCTO – on a schedule or whenever a new submission arrives.
You can nudge data collectors who haven’t submitted recently, alert your team the moment a record is submitted, or send respondents a copy of their own answers. You can also customize the content and appearance of these reminder emails based on your preference and needs. Each survey reminder is set up per form, and you can access this feature from the Design tab of your server console.
This feature is useful when:
Your data collectors are expected to submit regularly, and you want a standing nudge rather than reminding people manually.
You want to follow up only with the people who haven’t submitted, and leave everyone else alone.
You want to know about new submissions as they arrive, without watching the Monitor tab.
You want respondents to receive a confirmation containing their own answers.
You keep a list of contacts in a server dataset and want to email everyone on it.
Setting up a survey reminder
On the Design tab, each form has a Reminders action (the bell icon). It opens that form’s reminders panel, where you can add a new reminder, edit or pause an existing one, and review the activity log.
When you add a reminder, you can start from a template or configure everything yourself. The templates are just starting points – you can change anything afterwards:
| Weekly check-in | A recurring nudge to everyone with the same user role. |
| Overdue follow-up | Goes only to people who haven’t submitted. |
| Notify managers on new submission | Alerts team members based on their user roles whenever a record is submitted. |
| Send respondent a copy | Sends respondents a confirmation email containing their answers. |
| Email people in a dataset | Sends to a column of email addresses in a dataset. |
| Start blank | Configure every detail (e.g. content, appearance, send list) yourself. |
Survey reminder decisions
Whichever survey reminder you configure, you will also need to decide the following settings before a reminder can run:
1. When it runs
A reminder either runs on a schedule or when a new submission arrives.
Scheduled reminders run either daily or weekly. You choose the time of day, and – for weekly reminders – the days of the week. You also choose the timezone of the scheduled reminder. For example, you can schedule a reminder for “08:00 on Monday”, where the reminder will be sent at eight in the morning where your team actually is.
Reminder emails can also be set up to send the moment data is received by the server.
2. Who it goes to
Recipients for survey reminders can come from three places:
A user role. Everybody with the same user role.
A column in a server dataset. Every email address in the column you specify – useful for contacting people who don’t have SurveyCTO logins.
A field in the submission. The email address captured in the submission itself – useful for reminders that run when a submission arrives, such as sending respondents a copy of their answers.
3. Whether to skip anyone
A reminder can go to everybody every time, or only to people who have not submitted the form within a number of days that you choose. The second option is what makes an overdue follow-up reminder useful: people who have already done what you asked don’t get a redundant notification.
4. What it says
You write the reminder email subject line and the message. Both the subject and message can contain placeholders that the server fills in for each recipient. These placeholders dynamically populate values so that survey reminders can be personalized for each recipient.
There are default placeholders (see table below) for use. For reminders that run when a submission arrives, you can also use placeholders that are populated using submission values from your form fields. For example, if your form contains a field name called Date, you can include that Date field in a reminder email or subject line, and the server will dynamically pull in each respondent’s answer to populate the Date field placeholder.
To use placeholders, insert the default placeholders (see table below) or insert the field’s name inside the brackets: {field_name}. When inserting the field name, make sure you are using the value in the name column of your form definition or name field in the online form designer, and not the question label.
{form_title} | The form’s title. |
{recipient_name} | The name of the person being emailed. |
{submission_link} | A link to fill out the form on your server. |
{submission_count_today} | How many submissions the form has received today. |
{field_name}. Send yourself a test email to confirm every placeholder has a value before you activate the reminder.
Testing, pausing, and checking what happened
Before you turn a reminder on, send yourself a test email. The test uses realistic sample values for any placeholders, so you can see how the finished message will read.
Each reminder can be active or paused. You can pause and resume a reminder at any time without losing its configuration or its history.
Every reminder keeps an activity log showing what it did and when. Specifically, the log shows what reminder was sent, what failed, and what was deliberately skipped – along with the reason for each skip, such as a recipient who had already submitted, a blank email address, or an address on your server’s bounce-suppression list.
If reminders for a form fail – or are skipped for a reason that suggests something is wrong, such as a missing or blank email address, a suppressed email, or the daily sending limit – your server’s health checks will flag it (the server health monitor icon) so you can look at the log.
Survey reminder limits
Your subscription sets two separate limits, and you can see where you stand against both from the Usage icon in the top-right of your server console:
How many survey reminders you can have in total. This limit is checked when you create a reminder. If you have reached the limit, you’ll need to delete a reminder you no longer need before you can add another. You will still be able to edit reminders when you have reached the limit.
How many survey reminder emails your server can send per day. This total limit is shared by every reminder on every form in the server, and it resets every night at midnight UTC – not at midnight in your own timezone, and not at the start of your billing period.
What happens when the daily sending limit is reached
Once the server has sent its allowance for the day, any further reminder emails cannot go out until the limit resets at midnight UTC. You choose in advance what should happen to each reminder in that event using the When the daily email limit is reached setting:
| Skip remaining sends for today | The remaining reminder emails are discarded. They are recorded in the activity log as skipped because the daily limit was reached, and they are not sent later – not the next day, and not at all. |
| Hold and send after midnight (UTC) | The remaining emails are held and go out once the limit resets at midnight UTC. |
New reminders are set to skip remaining sends for today by default unless you change this setting beforehand. This choice also only applies going forward.
This means that there is no way to recover or re-send emails that have already been skipped and discarded, so if sending the reminder emails matter more than their timing, make sure to configure settings beforehand so that reminders are held and sent after midnight instead of being discarded.
Note: You will always be alerted when you have reached your daily sending limit. These alerts are shown in your server’s health checks (the server health monitor icon).
Things to keep in mind
One form per reminder. Each reminder belongs to the form you created it under, and its placeholders and fields refer to only that form.
Survey reminders send email only. There is no SMS or push notification option.
Recipients see a link, not the data. The
{submission_link}placeholder links to your server; anyone following the link still has to have permission to view individual submissions to see the data.Paused reminders are not queued up. Pausing stops sending, and resuming does not send whatever would have gone out while the reminder was paused. Instead, reminders will start sending from the point after your resume.
