How to measure the quality of your newsletter content with Formbricks

Newsletters are a form of email marketing which has the highest ROI of all marketing channels. According to the research (source below), for every dollar spent you can get a return of $36 to $40.

You reap this sweet, juciy ROI if your content resonates with your audience. You can only manage what you measure, so here is a quick, free and easy way to measure the quality of your newsletter content.

After this article, you have everything you need to easily measure the quality of your emails. We walk through you the setup, how to embed it in your email and what to do with the insights.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. How link prefilling and user identification maximize your insights
2. How to create the right survey with Formbricks
3. Embeddung the survey in your email
4. How to improve the analysis by identifying users
5. How to enrich the response with hidden fields
6. Auto-create surveys via API

Toes are in the water, let’s dive deep 🏊

How link prefilling and user identification maximize your insights

To effectively measure the quality of your newsletter, you need:

• Survey Embed Code: A code snippet to embed the survey in the email (provided by Formbricks)
• Link Prefilling: So that if a reader clicks on one of the stars or smileys in your rating survey, the data is stored and the first question is skipped (more on this later).
• Dynamic User Identification: You can append the email of the reader dynamically to the survey to automatically create a personal profile for the reader. Hence, if this person provides any other feedback in their customer lifetime, it is gathered in the person's view.

Let's see how to stack these features to get what you're looking for 🤓

How to create the right survey with Formbricks

1. After signing up on the Formbricks platform, you’ll be navigated to your dashboard. To create a survey for your newsletter, select the Growth filter and choose the “Improve Newsletter Content” survey template.

2. You’ll be directed to a page that will be your canvas for customizing your survey questions. For your survey’s first question, you can display smileys, stars, or even numbers for your survey rating; in the image below, we used a smiley.

3. When you are done customizing your survey questions, navigate to the Settings tab and choose the type of survey you want. Here, you have to pick Link Survey.

4. After configuring the survey settings however you like, click the Publish button on the top right corner of the page, and a modal should pop up once this is successful.

Embedding the survey in your email

Since you would traditionally want to embed this survey in your email, select the Embed Survey card. You will be directed to another window, where you'll find Embed in Email.

5. Finally, click the button with the “View Embed Code” text at the top right corner of the modal and simply copy the HTML code for your survey anywhere you want it in your newsletter. You can see the preview in the above image.

So, how does this work under the hood? In the next section, we’ll see how Formbricks utilizes link prefilling to create personalized responses for you.

How to improve the analysis by identifying users

Apart from the data prefilling needed to store which rating a user clicked on in an email, we use Formbricks link identification.

Link identification lets you link a response to a person. Whenever you set a userId in the URL, the Formbricks backend will create a new person profile.

This is what the link looks like:

https://formbricks.com/s/clrgp68g2569g1225h3f5ayql?rating=5&userId=johannes@formbricks.com

When do I need identified users?

This is mostly useful if you know that you will collect more feedback from this one person. For example, if you run an in-app or website survey, you can also pass the userId to Formbricks and both responses will be attributed to the same user.

This obiously also works for surveys sent to the same user over the customer lifetime.

In your dashboard on Formbricks, here’s how it will look:

As Johannes completes the survey, you'll see a personalized, full response from him.

How to use Hidden Fields to attach more info to responses

There might be more information you already have and want to use in the analysis of your survey results. A good way to facilitate that is using Hidden Fields.

Hidden Fields - as you can tell from the name - do not appear in the survey flow. They can be filled via URL as follows:

?fieldId=Content

So for example: ?job=Founder. Or combinbed with the rating and identification parameters:

https://formbricks.com/s/clrgp68g2569g1225h3f5ayql?rating=5&userId=johannes@formbricks.com&fieldId=Founder

As you see, the survey URL is powerful ally when it comes to getting the most out of your survey respondents 😎

In Conclusion

Understanding what resonates with your readers is the compass that points toward growth, and so far, we’ve seen how Formbricks can help you achieve this. Formbricks not only provides actionable insights but also serves as a bridge, closing the gap between your content and reader satisfaction.

Formbricks is free and easy to get started with. All you have to do is create an account and you are good to go 🚀

Source for ROI figure: Omnisend Blog