Create a Survey

Mailchimp surveys help you receive valuable feedback from your contacts and others who might be interested in your brand. Surveys are easy to share on the web or in Mailchimp campaigns, so people can engage with them immediately. And if your survey asks for an email address, you can use it to apply tags and grow your audience.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a survey.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• This article is about hosted surveys in Mailchimp. To learn how to add a simple poll or survey to your email content, read Add a Simple Poll or Survey to Your Campaign.
• Your account user level must be Manager or higher to create surveys.
• Each survey is associated with one audience in your account. After you finalize a survey, you cannot change the audience.
• Respondents who provide their email address will be added as either a subscribed or non-subscribed contact and count towards your monthly plan limit.
• Looking for inspiration? Check out these ideas for how you can use surveys.

Create a survey

When you create a survey, you'll choose an audience to associate it with. Responses will be collected in that audience, and people who opt in will be added as subscribed contacts.

To create your survey, follow these steps.

1. Click the Create icon.
   
2. Click Survey.
   
3. Choose an audience and click Begin.
   

Add content to your survey

To add content to your survey, follow these steps.

1. Click the plus icon (+) to add content to your survey.
   
2. Choose a section type based on whether you want respondents to use radio buttons, checkboxes, a number range, or an open text box. You can also add an introduction and ask people to provide their email address or contact information.
   

Here are some more details about each option.

• Introduction
  Creates an introduction to explain how respondents should use the survey via text or an embedded YouTube or Vimeo video.
• Radio Buttons
  Creates a multiple choice question that allows only one answer. Enter an option in the text field and hit Enter or Return to add more options. Toggle on the Toggle Other Option slider to let users fill in their own answer for the last answer choice.
• Checkboxes
  Creates a multiple choice question that allows multiple answers. Enter an option in the text field and hit Enter or Return to add more options. Toggle on the Toggle Other Option slider to let users fill in their own answer for the last answer choice.
• Range
  Displays numbers, stars, emojis, or hearts on a scale from low to high.
• Open Text
  Provides a text field for respondents to fill in their answers.
• Email
  Asks respondents for their email address to identify and tag respondents, or ask them to subscribe to your emails.
• Contact Information Asks respondents for their age, gender, first name, last name, or address. Answers will populate in corresponding merge fields for the Mailchimp contact if they provide their email or answer the survey via a campaign.
• Content Block
  Creates a content block to add text or video in between questions.

1. Type your question in the What would you like to ask? field.
   
   If you’re adding an introduction, you’ll add text or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo to welcome respondents to the survey.
   
2. In the Section Type sidebar, choose whether you want to require survey respondents to answer the question before they can submit the survey.
   
   Auto-tagging applies tags to your contacts based on their responses. You must share the survey through a Mailchimp email campaign or automation or add new contacts through the survey for tags to apply. Survey auto-tagging does not apply with the share anywhere anonymous link unless you add an email question type.
3. Repeat steps 1-4 for any other sections you want to add, click Duplicate Question to make a copy, or click Delete Question to remove a question.

Design your survey

To design your survey, follow these steps.

1. Click Continue To Design.
   
   Here are the options you'll see.
   • Branding
     Add a logo and description.
   • Custom Messaging
     Edit the survey title, submit button label, confirmation message, closed survey message, and require response error message.
   • Styles
     Edit background and button colors.
2. Once you've customized your design, click Review to continue.
   
3. Click Edit Survey Name to give the survey a name. The title is for internal organization and won't be visible to respondents.
   
4. Confirm your audience with the Audience drop-down. If you’re not sending the campaign via a Mailchimp campaign or automation, select the audience you’d want new contacts to be subscribed to. The survey must have an email field to subscribe new contacts.
5. Toggle the Reply to survey feedback with Inbox slider to the checkmark to see responses in your Mailchimp Inbox and reply to them from there.
6. Toggle the Daily Summary slider to the checkmark to get daily email summaries of new responses to your survey.
7. When you're done, click Continue.

Nice job. You've written and designed your survey and are ready to publish and share.

Publish and share your survey

Now that your survey is live, you’ll have the option to view the survey page, copy the survey URL, or share it in an email or social post.

Here are the different share options you’ll see.

• Share in a campaign or automation
  Creates a link to add in Mailchimp email campaigns and automations. Not-anonymous (responses are tracked if the respondent is already in your audience, or if you ask for respondents' email). Recommended for one-off surveys or recurring surveys.
• Share anywhere
  Creates a text link to send any way you prefer. Anonymous responses will be tracked if you ask for respondents’ email. Recommended for internal employee feedback, website feedback, order forms, chatbots, or when adding new contacts.
• Share on Facebook
  Takes you to Facebook and creates a draft post with a link to your survey.
• Share on Twitter
  Takes you to Twitter and creates a draft Tweet with a link to your survey.

View or export survey results

Every survey page has a Results section that provides an overview of survey responses.

In this section, you'll see the total number of responses from known contacts, unknown contacts, and new contacts.

• Known contacts
  Includes existing contacts in your audience, as well as new contacts who joined your audience when they provided their email address in your survey.
• Unknown contacts
  Respondents who didn't provide an email address. If you didn’t include an email question in your survey, all respondents will be unknown.
• New contacts
  Respondents who joined your audience when they provided their email address in your survey.

View all responses

To view a detailed breakdown of survey responses, click View Report.

Here, you can click each answer to see who submitted it and tag those contacts. Response info will be shown via a graph or chart depending on the question type. Click the Responses over time icon for a graph of how your respondents answered over the last 7, 30, 90, or 365 days.

The graph for questions that use ranges show the average of responses over time.

The graph for questions that use radio buttons or checkboxes for responses show the totals for each answer over time.

Click the Download chart icon to save a file of either the total answers or the responses over time, depending on which is currently enabled.

In the Contacts sidebar, you can click a specific contact to see all of their responses or delete responses. Click Tag Contacts to apply tags to either all contacts who responded or only selected contacts.

Click Export results to download a CSV of survey responses or a PDF of all the charts and graphs shown on the results dashboard, or click Back to survey to return to the survey summary page.

View segment

If survey respondents provided their email address, you can create a segment based on signup source, and see which subscribers were added by a survey.

Unpublish or delete a survey

After you’ve published a survey and collected enough responses, you can unpublish or delete it.

Unpublish a survey

If you need to take a survey offline without deleting any responses, you can unpublish it at any time.

To unpublish a survey, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
   
2. Click Surveys.
   
3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one associated with your survey.
4. Click the survey that you want to unpublish.
5. Toggle off the Turn On/Off slider.
   

Unpublished surveys will display a message that lets people know the survey is closed.

Delete a survey

When you delete a survey from your account, you’ll also lose all its survey responses. We recommend you unpublish surveys you want to take offline, but keep the survey in your Mailchimp account so you can access its data.

To delete a survey, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
   
2. Click Surveys.
   
3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
4. Check the box next to any survey that you want to delete.
5. Click the Delete button.
   
6. In the Are you sure? pop-up modal, type DELETE and click the Delete button.
   

Deleted surveys will display a 404 page not found message when someone attempts to visit the URL.