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.
The 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 place a survey in an email body 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 place a survey in a single email, but you can’t place 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.
5 and 1/2 easy steps to embed a survey in your email newsletter using Google Forms
Grab this post as PDF to read later!
Bonus: 3 surefire ways to get more survey responses
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.
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 placed in an email body this way will also pass all the spam filters and will reach all of your subscribers, given your other settings are in order.
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 only. Make sure you check the “Include form in Email” box:
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
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 within an email body.
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 Notepad (or any other simple text editor) and copy-paste its contents into MS Word (or any other rich text editor).
Note: If you open the file directly with MS Word it will show the rendered HTML (like a browser), not the actual HTML code you need.
Using the Find & Replace function make the following replacements:
1) Remove all occurrences of =^p (this will remove a line break after “=”, together with “=”)
Important: In this step, you are not looking for a sequence of 3 characters “=” followed by “^” followed by “p” but for a character “=” followed by a line break. In Word, “^p” is a special character that means “new paragraph”. So, you want the lines like this:
abc=
def
become this:
abcdef
If you can’t use MS Word, google how to remove line breaks in the tool that you have.
2) Remove all occurences of 3D
3) Remove empty lines by replacing ^p^p with ^p
4) Find the first occurence of <table and remove all the text above it.
5) Find the occurrence 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 it as a plain text.
Insert your code as a source code, not as a plain text
At this point, your survey has been successfully placed within the body of your email newsletter and you should be able to preview it.
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.
Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional)
If you know HTML and CSS, the 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:
…and after the “Submit” button:
…so that when your subscribers open their emails, the survey would something like this:
When your subscribers open your email newsletter, they will see your survey within the email.
Is it cool, or what?
Save this post as PDF to always have it handy!
Bonus: 3 surefire ways to get more survey responses
Here’s again the summary of the steps to embed a survey in an email newsletter:
Summary of the steps to embed the survey into your email newsletter
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
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 the email body of 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: Embed your survey in your 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.
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:
I’d like to teach you the things you want to know. Answer the questions you have. Solve the problems you are struggling with. To be able to do that, I need a bit more information.
Could you please answer these 3 and 1/2 questions below? It’s anonymous and I won’t find out what answers came from whom. Thanks a lot in advance!
Troubleshooting: What to do if your form doesn’t work
Test the “clean” version of the form, without deleting anything from the original (i.e. without implementing the optional Step 5 1/2).
Using MailChimp? Sorry, this hack won’t work for you. 🙁 MailChimp says that there may be problems with forms like this and many people reported in the comments that it indeed didn’t work for them in MailChimp.
Google if your email marketing software has a problem with forms like this. You can google “how to embed a form in X”, where X is the tool you are using (Aweber, ConvertKit, etc.)
Make sure neither the form labels nor any other text within the form includes “weird” characters. If you’re creating a form in French, for example, although the original form on Google Forms looked fine, some characters may get screwed up by the time you’re inserting the form code into your email marketing tool. So in Step 5 while you’re inserting the form into your email newsletter, carefully check all the characters in the form and correct them if necessary.
Multiple choice options don’t work? Try placing these options in a drop-down menu. Drop-down menu doesn’t work? Try multiple choice.
“Submit” button doesn’t work? It’s usually a sign that your HTML code has errors. Probably, while you were removing parts of it, you have removed too much or added an extra character. Go through the whole process again, testing the form every time after you remove a piece of code. This way, if you remove too much, you’ll be able to identify when that happened, reverse this particular step and try again without having to start from the beginning.
Want more people to answer your survey?
Get this PDF with the instructions from this post and the bonus tips on how to get more survey responses
Gill Andrews is a conversion copywriter and web consultant who turns underperforming websites into slick lead- generating machines. To tune up your business website, get her ultimate website checklist 2023.
180 thoughts on “How to Embed a Survey in an Email Newsletter (Using Google Forms)”
Sounds great but just can’t get it to work at all.
Followed the instructions multiple times but when using tick boxes and comment boxes they don’t show in the email and the submit button doesn’t work from any Outlook email address we have tested.
What happens when the recipient hits SUBMIT? Do I receive an email with the recipient’s data (email, name, etc) and the results of my survey?
My issue is that I would like to embed a couple of questions with radio buttons and write the results in a CRM like Mailchimp or another. Since I’m using a CRM (Sendinblue) to send an email to a list, I don’t want to force the recipient to write her email in a Google Form, be it within the message or in a browser’s window.
When I try to integrate Google Forms with the CRM via Zapier, without including the email field in the original google form, Zapier doesn’t find any data whatsoever and this is why I would want to use your solution. But again, what happens after the recipient hits SUBMIT?
Hi Marino. Since this method describes the integration of email and Google Forms, when one presses “submit”, the infos are sent to the corresponding Google form. If your form doesn’t ask for a recipient’s email, their email address won’t be submitted to the form.
Hey, this is amazing thank you so much. These are my issues:
1. I used Google docs to clean up the text and couldn’t find any of the ^p you mentioned, so some of text is still not super cleaned up but i can do that manually
2. The buttons for multiple choice disappear when I preview the code snipper. Everything else shows, the text, the submit button they show, but the selection boxes aren’t working.
Glad you found it useful. Re your question: It’s almost impossible to tell what’s wrong with the code without looking at it. But it’s odd that you weren’t able to find the occurrences of ^p. Have you seen the section “Important” under the screenshot in the Step #4? You shouldn’t be looking for occurrences of 3 characters “=”, “^”, and “p” but for line breaks.
Maybe it’s worth having another look at that “Important” section. That’s usually the reason why one can’t find ^p (which are definitely there).
I tried the steps you showed, and it ALMOST worked. But every time after clicking ‘save’, Klaviyo seems to remove certain codes that hide the multiple choice / drop downs and also the submit button – making the form only plain text.
Any idea if this works on Klaviyo / any possible errors that you could think of?
My apologies for the belated response. Unfortunately, I don’t even know what Klaviyo is, sorry 🤷 And whatever possible errors I could think of I’ve listed in the section “Troubleshooting: What to do if your form doesn’t work”.
Hope you’ll be able to find / have found a solution.
I followed all the steps you listed and even though the Google survey looks embedded in Gmail when I try to answer the questions, it still takes me to the email’s own web page. What might have I done wrong?
I was reading this and vaguely remembered I saw a tool that extracted the form HTML automatically, googled and I found it! https://stefano.brilli.me/google-forms-html-exporter/ It’s from 2017, but as far as I know it still works.
I have been able to get everything to show up in the email except the actual questions/submit button, I am using MyEmma. I tried doing one step at a time and testing the code each step, but it didn’t look right at all either just showing code or unformatted words up until I got to the last step, where when input it all looks right expect for the complete absence of the actual questions and submit button!
Do you have any advice on that, or do you have an example code that works that I could try to compare with it?
Do you observe this even if you don’t follow the last step (i.e. don’t remove branding / customize the way the form looks)? If that’s the case, then it means that MyEmma doesn’t allow particular parts of the code.
But if the questions and “submit” button show up after Step 5 but disappear after Step 5 1/2, then it does sound as if something got messed up while changing the code.
I don’t have any sample code that works as an example, unfortunately. But when this happens to my code, I simply copy-paste it in the email software after each clean-up step, saving the previously working state of the code in a separate file so that I can always go back to the working state and repeat the change.
Hey,
Is it possible that the receiver can open the Google form by any chance. I don’t want to expose Google form, the recipient should only see the survey and no hidden link.
I’m not sure I understand your question. You say you’d like the receiver to be able to open the Google from. But you also say you don’t want to expose the Google form…
If you mean that you’d like the user to see only the form itself, without knowing that it comes from Google form, it’s possible, but only in theory.
You can style it visually as if it’s just a form (your own branding + no link to Google forms whatsover). But:
1) Whether a receiver will be able to fill out the form from their email client (i.e. whether the form will be interactive for them) depends on the device and browser / app a receiver opens it on (please see the post / other comments for details). So, for those who won’t be able to do that, you need to add a link like “Form doesn’t work? Fill it out here” where you give them a link to the Google form directly.
2) The moment they click the submit button, they get a message telling them that they’ll be submitting their data to Google forms and asking them to confirm. This dialog is impossible to remove.
Hi this didn’t work for me it went to spam because when I tried to send it to myself it would not let me check the box “include form in email” is there a work around for that.
Hi Rachel. Sorry to hear it didn’t work for you. I’m afraid I don’t have enough info to say what went wrong exactly. It’s possible that this solution doesn’t work with your device or software. You’ll find some common problems and solutions described in the “Troubleshooting” section.
In the SEND FORM window, why not choose the Send via -> “Embed HTML” to get the code? Wouldn’t that be easier than Send via email and hustle to clean up the code?
THANK YOU! I tried in the past o find a solution for embedding surveys in email and gave up after not finding any answers. Today I decided to give it another shot and see if the internet evolved in its collective knowledge and was not disappointed. This post is gold! <3
This post has been tremendously helpful for me at work. And it’s very well-written & easy to follow along. I use python to send out automated emails (email template is in HTML) and needed to embed a google form and this worked like a charm!! Thank you so so much.
Hi Emily. My pleasure… and thank you so much for taking the time to let me know 🙂 It’s always great to hear that my posts made a difference in someone’s day.
This is amazing. Thank you. Only problem is that something is not quite right with the submit button. When clicked, it brings the person back to the original Google form and doesn’t record the response. Any idea why? THANKS!
Hi Elizabeth. I’m afraid it’s impossible to say what exactly is the problem. But when your “Submit” button doesn’t work, it’s a sign that the HTML code has errors. Probably, while you were removing parts of it, you have removed too much or added an extra character.
I’d suggest going through the whole process again, but testing the form every time you remove a piece of code. This way if you remove too much, you’ll be able to identify when that happened, reverse this particular step and try again without having to start from the beginning.
Hey Gill!
I also used this method but I was wondering if it is possible that no new tab with the confirmation message opens. Do you know if thats possible somehow?
Hey Lori. I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The confirmation message has nothing to do with Google Forms, but comes from the email software (for ex., Gmail) itself, and I don’t think there’s a way to suppress it.
Hello! This has honestly been an eye-opening experience. I love it! I am, however, struggling with the =^p part we are supposed to find and replace. Are the =^p each individual characters we are supposed to remove? For example: replace = with nothing?
Hi Anna. =^p doesn’t stand for a sequence of 3 characters, “=”, “^” and “p”. It stands for “=” plus a line breaks. So, this substitution should remove all characters “=” followed by a line break.
In MS Word, line breaks are marked as “^p”. If you’re using another editor, it can be another characters.
Please see Step 4.1, gray box under the first screenshot.
Thank you so much!! This tutorial was extremely helpful. I have been wanting to add a poll to my email for a long time, but could never figure it out. THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I love all the photos too. 🙂
Sorry, had a brain sneeze there – put left the wrong email address! Anyway — so, yes, is it possible to embed simple gform questions in the body of a normal gmail message?
Hi Paul. I have no idea, to be honest. But if you’re sending this survey from your Gmail address, I’m assuming it’s not a marketing message, and people you’re sending it to know you. Then, you can just add a link to the survey, and I’m sure they will make that effort and reply.
If you’re trying to send a newsletter from a Gmail address to a lot of people at once, this is a bad idea, because it will most probably will be flagged as spam anyways and your recipients won’t even get to see your email. In this case, I recommend to register for the free plan of an email marketing software (for ex., MailerLite).
This totally worked for me, EXCEPT, on questions on my survey where I allow a paragraph answer, the survey shows a long, black box for that area. Weird. And none of my html savvy guys here at home can figure out how to get rid of it.
Sorry to hear that, Laurie. Actually, the html savvy guys should have been able to sort out that one… I haven’t heard of this problem before, so don’t have any suggestions for you here, unfortunately.
This was amazing and incredibly helpful, but when I sent myself a test, I could select the answers and it looked great, but I couldn’t actually submit the responses at the end of the survey.
Yes. I’d click on the button, but nothing would happen. I checked the Google form responses to be sure. Still 0 responses.
I’m using Active Campaign to send the campaign. Using a Mac to submit the response. I also tried with an iPhone. I still couldn’t submit unfortunately.
Well, the most likely reason for this would be that you accidentally deleted too much and broke the form itself. So I’d suggest first testing this without any changes to the form.
But if you inserted it as it is, haven’t deleted anything and it still doesn’t work, then I’d recommend looking at the errors that the browser throws when you press the “submit” button (in Chrome, More tools -> Developer tools -> Console).
Using mailjet I am completely unable to get this to work unfortunately. I can embed the whole survey using the embed link given by google, but it is not customizable and I can’t remove any elements of the form. Upon following the directions all of the formatting gets undone, several dropdown options become misspelled.
I have a very basic HTML knowledge, not nearly enough to rebuild the survey much less create my own along with a way to record responses.
If you could give any help or thoughts I would greatly appreciate it!
Hi Ethan. Sorry to hear you’re having problems with this, but I’m afraid it’s impossible to say what’s going wrong without seeing the survey code and replicating the steps in Mailjet. It does look like you’d need someone with advanced HTML/CSS knowledge to look at it.
While this is a nice trick, it’s not very practical. – All the issues with the various email platforms aside from gmail are one big issue .. but the Biggest Issue is that over 60% of people that read most emails do so from a mobile device, and this hack while a good attempt, does not work on any mobile device. So, it ends up being alot of code tweaking, and testing, for not. – Thx though for the attempt.
It’s certainly won’t work in 100% of the cases. But as you can also see from the comments, many people found it useful. It’s especially useful for bloggers or really small businesses that have only a few questions to ask.
Re the issue on mobile:
Although your subscribers can’t answer the survey directly from a mobile device, they see the questions displayed in the email. And this also increases the response rate in comparison to if you just gave them a link (assuming you added a line “Can’t answer directly in the email? Click here>>”).
Your subscribers may see that these are interesting questions or indeed a 3-question survey, so they are more likely to take a minute to answer them then if it was just a link.
I wasn’t planning to save the world with this post. I developed this hack for a friend, and has also been using it myself after that. I was actually surprised how many people have found it useful.
When I receive the email, fill out the form and click submit I get the data but nothing happens on the page like: “Thank you for filling out the survey” – Is there a way to have an automated message that lets them know the form was filled out correctly? Thanks!
Hi Mike. Normally, after your subscribers submit their data, they get redirected to the “thank you” page hosted by Google Forms that says “Thanks. Your answer has been reordered.” or whatever you specified it to say (you can do that in the settings on the Google Forms side).
I’ve never seen a case where there was no redirect happening, sorry. So no idea what may be going wrong.
Hi, thank you for the idea. I followed the steps and everything went well however the submit option at the end of the survey is not working. The error message says “invalid URL or link” can you help me on this.
Hi, thank you for the idea. I followed the steps and everything went well however the submit option at the end of the survey is not working. The error message says “invalid URL or link” can you help me on this.
Very good tip and I would like to use this as a confirmation email.
I’m thinking to have just 2 radio buttons with “agree” and “don’t agree”.
So in the Form Responses, I get a bunch of “agree” and a bunch of “don’t agree” submissions but I can’t see who agrees and who not.
Of course, I can ask them to put their email in the form again, but this is not foolproof.
I just want the email of the receiver next to their answer in my Form Response tab.
I’m thinking maybe if I sent out the email using Google script I can add the email address somehow in the body of the email ( form) so that the Form Response tab is picking up the email address and records this as well.
Do you think this is possible?
Hi Joris. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to record the email of the respondent without their explicit consent (i.e. without making them explicitly input it in an input field). Because you just copy-paste code from the third party, this code doesn’t store any information about the email address of the recipient. Not sure about Google script, as I don’t have any experience with that, but many email providers block things like that, and your email may land in spam.
But regardless of that, I’m not sure a survey is a right tool to use for a confirmation email. Why not just use the usual confirmation emails from your email marketing software?
First of all, thank you a lot for providing this detailed tutorial!
And i see you have helped a lot of people with the troubleshooting in the comments, great job!!
I am curious about how much this way of sending a survey reflects on the obtained traction. Has any of you actually measured the effect of embedding the surveys in the email and noticing a big difference in the number of responses achieved?
One more question that maybe you, Gill, any of the readers knows, from my testing the submit button works properly only for Gmail users (at least those that use the Gmail in a browser or the App), is there a way to know if an email address (e.g. from my mailing list) is a G Suite domain? i.e. they use a non @gmail.com address but the email service is provided by Google.
Knowing this would be great in order to target only the people that are actually able to fill the form from their email and do no frustrate the rest of the audience (don’t know if that really happens or it just makes them more engaged even if they have to fill the answers twice, one time in the email and one in the form because the submission in the email didn’t work).
Hi Victor. Happy to hear you found this tutorial useful. I’m afraid, I don’t have any definite answers for you. I didn’t conduct any comparison tests to see whether an embedded survey gets more answers. And I don’t know how to determine whether it’s a G Suite domain, sorry 🤷
OMG it’s not often that a website will have a step by step tutorial that works! I usually have to go search some more or troubleshoot to finish the task. But this worked PERFECTLY!! Thank you so much for this! I can’t believed it worked on the first try! I
Thank you for the info, but I’m having trouble downloading the original message. Keep getting a .eml file instead of a .txt, and the .eml file doesn’t have the HTML elements (such as “=^p”).
Hi, Gill- First, thanks so much for sharing this! I tried to do this with SendInBlue and got the form to appear in the preview, but when I sent myself a test email, the form wouldn’t show up at all. It just displays “Loading…” in the space where it should appear in the newsletter. Have you had this happen? Any thoughts about what might be going wrong? Thanks so much!
My pleasure. Sorry to hear you’re having troubles implementing this. Unfortunately, I have no experience with SendInBlue and have tried this only in MailerLite. Every email software has its own restrictions regarding HTML. For example, this won’t work in MailChimp because they block the
Hi Gil,
Thanks so much for this. I just scrolled through the comments to see if someone else was having a similar problem as me. Someone did, but never saw the solution.
I was able to get the survey into MailerLite, and it looks good enough. But when I send out an email and hit the “submit” button to the survey, nothing happens and no results are recorded.
I know it’s hard for you to guess what I’m doing wrong, but any idea? I haven’t done anything to do the code except what you listed.
Glad to hear you found the guide helpful. Re your question:
As you’re using MailerLite, there’s certainly the way to make the form work. The way you describe the situation, it looks like that, while removing the elements to customize your form, you’ve also removed something that was vital for the form to function. I saw this happening before.
I would suggest the following:
1. Start by copy-pasting the code without any changes and change if the “Submit” button works (which it should if you’re using MailerLite).
2. Don’t remove / customize your form all at once but start removing things one-by-one:
(a) Remove an element (or two, if you feel confident)
(b) Retest the form:
If it works, save the code in a backup file and repeat from step (a).
If it doesn’t work, open the latest backup file with the version of the form that still worked and try Step #2 again, this time removing less or being more attentive.
Unfortunately, that’s the most concrete advice I can give you at this point.
Hi. Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say what may be going wrong without seeing the form itself. Have you checked the “Troubleshooting” section at the end of the post? It summarizes the common problems and offers some solutions.
Everything is working up to Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional). After I select the elements I want to remove, I press DEL on my keyboard but nothing happens. Please tell me what I should be doing! I am using Mailerlite by the way.
Re your question: It’s difficult to say what’s going wrong, as it depends on the form itself. Actually, selecting and pressing “DEL” as I showed on the screenshot should work. Maybe try to select and delete elements not in bulk but one-by-one. Or press BACKSPACE after you select an element.
Hi
Is it possible to create survey where we collect name and email address (that is possible 🙂 so any user can leave his/hers contact, that will be stored in spreadsheet,
But when a user want to be deleted from that spreadsheet, can it be done so he can do that by himself through a form of some kind, without access to spreadsheet.
I as admin/creator can do that by deleting the entry, but can somehow user do that by himself?
Similar as you can register for newsletter and then deregister if you don’t like what you get.
Basically I need to collect some personal data for my operations, that user will give (like name, surname, address, phone, email – that can be done through simple survey.
But when registered user wants to be deleted from the list or just change provided data (let say different address) can in any way user do that by himself, without involving me to do that for him?
Hi Saso. I’m not a Google Forms expert, and embedding a survey in an email is my only experience with it. But I don’t think that user removing themselves from the list is possible with Google Forms. It’s just a simple forms solution, not a data management system.
I’m having trouble implementing this – although I can see it work on the preview of the email, when I sent myself a test message it didn’t work.. could you help maybe?
Great hack, thanks so much for sharing! While this worked for a few surveys I needed to do, I’m looking for my next survey to be embedded and submitted in the email, without any pop-ups, regardless of the respondent’s email address (i.e. Gmail).
It sounds like Google Forms will not support this. Is there another application or software you know of that supports this type of embedded survey and email submission? Preferably free…
I am just sending my form to 15 close associates and was trying to use my outlook account. I could not insert code using outlook. The only option they had was to attach as a file.
If you’re using Outlook desktop:
1. Copy back to Notepad (or similar)
2. Save As (.htm)
3. Open email, click insert attachment
4. Select HTML file of form
5. Select “insert as text”
Hi Polina. Google Drive considers Google Forms to be documents as well. So, the way I see it, the message you get can be caused by 2 things:
1) The form you’ve embedded in the newsletter doesn’t exist anymore.
2) You deleted a couple of characters too many so that the reference link to the form is wrong in the newsletter itself.
I would suggest to embed the form carefully deleting only the necessary things first (steps 1-5) and check if it works. Only then, if you’d like to customize the look, delete things one-by-one and test every time you remove something to prevent the form from breaking again.
On desktop PC:
* The subscribers with Gmail/Googlemail addresses will be able to answer the whole survey within the email on their desktop PC.
* Others will be redirected to the survey in the browser as soon as they try answering anything.
On phones and tablets:
* The subscribers with Gmail/Googlemail addresses will be able to answer the whole survey within the email only if they’re viewing it in the browser but not the app.
First I would like to say… thanks for this great resource!
Second, I am having an issue with…
1.) My form appearing centered with the rest of my email. (I am using MailerLite).
2.) My form actually being able to record the submissions (The submit button isn’t working).
The center position is triggered by styling that is off and can be fixed with CSS.
Re submission button not working: Have you looked through the troubleshooting section and tried the suggestions listed there? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say anything concrete about this without seeing the code.
I managed to figure out the centering issue by just starting from scratch with the code and trying again and it seemed to fix it… I may have just erased something by mistake.
Regarding the submission… I tried embedding it without removing anything (i.e. the “Google Forms” logos at the top and bottom) and the submission worked so I must be erasing something important… are you aware of the line of code that needs to be included to prevent this issue from happening?
(sorry I am not to savvy with code)
I’m afraid there is no definite answer to your question. Potentially, there are dozens of lines and hundreds (thousands?) of characters that if removed will break your form.
The best solution would be to ask a friend who understands HTML and CSS to help you out.
Hey Gill,
I connected with you a few weeks back. I was able to embed Google forms into my email. However, I cannot answer/reply on the form using the form. I tested one email to check if I could give my responses. It worked well on a desktop but not on the mobile device.
Hi Tanya. If everything else is working fine, the multiple choice options should be working too (I just created a form to double-check if they are generally working). Not sure how to help you at this point as I don’t know your form. The only thing I can think of: If the multiple choice options don’t work in a “clean” version of the form (i.e. without you deleting anything), try substituting the multiple choice options with a drop-down.
I did everything as it was mentioned in the post. Followed all the coding steps too. I am using Mail chimp for my email campaign. Sure. Will give the drop-down option a go and see if it works. Thanks for the prompt reply 🙂
Oh, so you are using MailChimp and the form seems to partially work? That’s interesting because some people tried doing this in MailChimp, and it didn’t work at all. I later had a look at it, and it seems like this isn’t possible in MailChimp at all. See this comment here:
Hey Gill,
Yes, it partially works for me. Just the radio buttons are not visible. Anyway, I will still try it with other options, like the drop-down as suggested by you and let you know. Thanks a lot for the help!
Cool. Yes, please let me know how it goes. I’ll be adding a Troubleshooting section to this post and it would be helpful for others to know that it can work in MailChimp as well. Thanks so much in advance 👍
Hey, Gill
It does work partly with drop-down. However, the radio would still not work. Also, right after saving the coded part in Mailchimp. It automatically removes my coding and replaces it with plain text. So, I don’t think it is possible on MailChimp!
Sorry to hear this, Tanya. Unfortunately, that’s how MailChimp treats these forms. 🤷
Great post, Gill! This is exactly what we’re looking to do for a regular e-newsletter we send out to prospects. I’ve followed your steps, but am having the issue of the Submit button not working once embedded in the email. We use Pardot as our email marketing software. Any tips to make it work?
Hi Rachel. I must admit I’ve never heard of Pardot, so I’m not sure whether it has any specific issues with forms like that. Generally speaking, you could check if:
1) The form works without applying instructions in Step 5 (i.e. in its original form, without removing or changing things). Otherwise, it may have happened that you’ve removed too much of the code.
2) All the characters in the form labels and in-formm text are displayed properly. We had a case where someone was creating a form in French. It got screwed up in the the original_msg.txt file and had to be manually corrected in the final version of the form to make it work.
3) Your email software generally doesn’t allow HTML forms. This is the case with MailChimp, for example. I just did a Google search on this, and Pardot say they don’t recommend it but they don’t say it’s generally impossible. (So if this info is up-to-date, this shouldn’t be an issue). Here’s the article that talks about embedding forms in Pardot emails.
I’m using Zoho CRM and also having a problem with the embedded form – I was able to fill out all of the data within the email, but in the final step – “Submit”, no confirmation screen and no information / responses were recorded in the Google Survey. I tried this before removing the Google branded content at the beginning and end (the optional deletions), and also tried after removing the branded content – and nothing. It there a work-around?
Hi Shimite. I’ve never heard of Zoho CRM, sorry. Have you checked for the special characters within the labels and the text in the form and are you sure your system allows embedded forms (if they don’t you will probably find it explicitly stated somewhere on their website)?
Hi Mariah. I have no idea how this would work in Outlook, sorry. But if you are sending your survey to multiple people and you have a website, I recommend using a (free) email marketing software (even if you are sending this to 5 people). See my previous comments for details.
Hey Gill, Thanks for this tip! When I try to use it, everything looks fine, but the questions are unanswerable. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong?
Hi Brian. Could you please specify what you mean by “unanswerable questions”? You can’t select an option or type the text in the answer box? Also, what software did you use to embed the survey and send the email and what device are you trying to answer it from (smartphone, desktop PC, tablet)?
I think I figured out the issue from another one of your answers. I was trying to use mailchimp. Basically the questions and answers would appear, but none of them could be clicked or selected.
This is VERY cool!! Is it possible to add it into an email via apple Mac Mail or in my gmail account? I don’t see an “insert Source Code” option. Thanks 🙂
Re Mac Mail: No idea, to be honest. I’m an Android / Windows person. The only i-anything I ever owned was an iPad 3 that died years ago.
Re Gmail: I’m not sure I understand the question. Could you please specify what you are trying to do? Sending a survey via Gmail is an in-built function of Google Forms described in Step 2 of this article. But I’m guessing you are trying to do something else with Gmail.
If you could give me some more details re your plans for your survey I may be able to offer concrete advice.
Thanks for the speedy reply!! I primarily only use mac… So really trying to add to an email there. I wasn’t able to add it into a gmail email after all the copy either. I ended up just sending it via the forms email option. Looking into better options since it exceeded the max send limits. boo!! Thanks for the post!! I’ll be using it again 🙂
Ah, I see. Well, if you are sending multiple emails with a survey, I would suggest using an email marketing software and not an email client (Gmail, Mac mail, etc.). Not only your email will have better chances to pass the spam test and land in your recipients’ inboxes but you will also be able to see how many people have actually opened the email.
MailerLite (the one I’m using for my email newsletters and the one I made the screenshots for this post from) is easy to set up, free up to 1000 email addressees, and you can send unlimited emails. So even if it’s just 5 people you are trying to send the survey to, it’s worth it.
An important fact to keep in mind if you decide to go with an email marketing software: This hack doesn’t work with MailChimp.
Gill, Cool hack! Question: when I try to complete the Google form via my iPhone and click on the “Submit” button, it does not give me the confirmation page. Instead, it forces me to open up Safari and then fill in the form again. That’s a frustrating UX. Do you know if others have had this problem and how to fix it? Thanks for whatever help you can provide.
Very cool hack. I’m having problems, though. The submit button doesn’t seem to work and the answer isn’t recorded in my spreadsheet. If I click on the “Fill Out in Google Forms” link in the email and choose an answer there, then it works, but answering directly in the email doesn’t seem to.
I thought perhaps I’d eliminated too much code when removing the Google-specific stuff, but I tried it again leaving all of that and it still doesn’t work.
Hi John. You mean Google Forms, not Google Docs, right? To show how to remove the header would require a lengthy answer with some screenshots. I would have to come back to you in the evening on this. Hope that’s ok.
Hi Gill, yes, Google Forms. I probably didn’t describe this well. The header once the survey is launched is great but in the body of the email the header is a rather clunky Google Forms header. Wondering if I can get the web page header to appear in the body of the email and also whether I can send the survey from my non-gmail business account. Whatever direction you can provide would be great. I don’t want to put you out. Thanks.
First, I won’t recommend sending emails to multiple people directly through your business account (Gmail or not), as mass sending of the emails may get marked as spam on the receiving end, and the people it’s meant to will never get to see your email.
So, I would recommend doing it using a proper email marketing tool (there are plenty of free options out there).
The advantages of using an email marketing tool for that would be:
For your recipients, it will still look as if your email came from your business address (or whatever address you connect with the tool).
You can design your emails much easier by drag-and-dropping things. Your current challenge will have an easier answer as well (more on this in a second).
You will know exactly who opened your email and who didn’t. Using this information, you will be able to send the survey again in a couple of days to the recipients who might have missed and, thus, get more responces.
I use MailerLite, which is free up to 1000 unique email recipients.
Regarding the situation with the Google Forms header, and that you’d like to exchange it with the header of your website:
If you aren’t using a visual editor like one that comes with MailerLite (or any other email marketing tool), you’ll need to remove some HTML code and write some new HTML/CSS code instead. As I don’t have the HTML code of your survey in front of me, I can’t tell you exactly what you need to remove. But any person with some understanding of HTML would be able to help you as soon as you show them the code of the survey.
If you send your email with the survey with MailerLite, for example, you can remove the header by simply selecting it and clicking DEL (like you would remove any other text). I’ve explained how to do that in this post. See subsection “Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional)”.
In an email marketing tool, you’ll be also able to add a header of your website to your email by drag-and-drop.
Thanks, Vijay. Sorry, I didn’t quite get your question. What do you mean by “use html in Netcore”? Could you please describe the exact steps you took and what the result of each step was?
I tried e-mail marketing tool Netcore, but it does not work.
Now, I am trying with MailChimp, however when I pasted the code in mailchimp the Google form structure is retained but the buttons(radio buttons, checkboxes) where missing. I can see only the questions and answer options without buttons.
Ah, interesting. I opened it in a text editor (Notepad++) first and then copy-pasted the content in Word. Thanks so much for letting me know! I’ll mention it in the post to clarify.
Hi Gil !
Thank you for this tutorial ! I have managed to embed the survey into my newsletter (I also use Mailerlite) but the button “submit” doesn’t work and doesn’t record the answers when the campaign is sent. Do you know why?
Hi Julia. It’s difficult to say without looking at the form itself but I would guess that you’ve accidentally removed too much code. Were you customizing the look of the form in MailerLite’s visual editor or by working with the raw code and removing HTML tags by hand?
Thank you for this quick reply ! I also did a test without customizing the look of the form and it doesn’t work either.
For customization I use the visual editor. I’m going to try one more time from the beggining !
Thank you for this quick reply ! I also did a test without customizing the look of the form and it doesn’t work either.
For customization I use the visual editor. I’m going to try one more time from the beggining !
Yes, I also wanted to suggest trying it out without customization first. But if you say it’s not working even without customization, that’s really weird. Can you send me the form from the Google Forms to contact (at) gillandrews.com? Thanks.
I have tried again all the process from the beginning and I have still the same result.
I have just sent you my form, thank you very much for your assistance, it’s really nice !
No problem 🙂 I got your form, thanks. I’ll look into it and respond via email.
Hi Gill!
Absolutely love this! So like Julia I am having the same issue. It all looks good when I put it into MailerLite but when I send it the Submit button will not work and no responses are recorded. Were you ever able to figure out the issue?
Thank you for sharing this with us!
Hi there Molly 🙂 Yes, we were able to figure out the issue. She was writing the survey in French, and the special characters of the French alphabet got screwed up in the “original_message.txt”. The way to fix it was simple: Just correct the text of the questions right there, in the MailerLite editor.
Could you please verify that the text of your survey’s questions is displayed properly in both: MailerLite editor dialog on the right and the main preview dialog on the left? If it still doesn’t help, feel free to send me the survey the same way Julia did and I’ll look into it.
Hi Gill, great article! I’m trying to embed a google form in a MailChimp email and am wondering if you’ve ever done this. When I pasted the html into the backend of MailChimp it didn’t properly transfer the form capabilities, just the text.
This sounds great and exactly what I was looking for. However I need to embed the survey in a reply to only one person. I don’t use Mailer Lite, just gmail’s own email compose window. Any idea how I can paste the source code into that?
Does it necessarily have to be a reply or can it also be a new email to that person’s email address?
If latter is the case, you could just go to your Google Forms, open the survey you’d like to send them and press “Send” button (at the right -top corner). Then enter their email address and tick a checkbox “Include form in email”.
Like this:
Alternatively, you could send the form to yourself and then try to copy-paste the part with the survey from that email into your reply. I haven’t tried this out, so not sure if this will work. But it’s your best shot, as I don’t think you can paste HTML code in a Gmail email.
Thanks, I appreciate your inputs and effort.
I’d already tried sending it to myself and copy-pasting
the form. I wasn’t fully satisfied with it and wanted to edit
out some portions of the form.
In any case, thanks again!
You can create an HTML code snippet the way I suggested in this article. To prepare it beforehand, you can use anything that renders HTML (for example, create a dummy post on your blog).
Wow. I appreciate this SO much. Going the extra mile to help!
Thank you.
Hey there,
Nice posts, exactly what I was looking for!
About embedding HTML in Gmail; I am doing Drafts in which using Plain Text mode I write directly the HTML code on them. Then you can use an email processor such as Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) to send emails automatically by selecting that draft.
It works and it is pretty easy 🙂
This is exactly what I was looking for. Although, when I’m editing orginal message and trying to remove =^p, ^p^p and 3D – I find nothing. Am I doing something wrong or did Google change something?
Gill, this is a wonderful hack you discovered!
Just a question- why does the survey redirect to the Google forms page after a surveyor clicks the submit button? Is this problem unique to me?
Hi Janie. Glad you found this helpful. Re redirect on submit:
This has to do with 2 things:
1) How email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) react when some data is submitted from an email to an external destination (that’s why the pop-up window asking the users to confirm that they indeed want to submit the data)
b) The way Google Forms forms are designed. By default, all forms created will Google Forms will redirect to the “thank you” page of the corresponding form after the response is submitted. As I haven’t seen anything in the code of a form (the code that you paste into your newsletter) that triggers it, I assume it’s something that is triggered on the side of Google Forms after the response is submitted. Which would mean there is no way to prevent this redirect.
Thanks, Kitty! And I will show you how to style it so it fits your theme. You can make it look like anything you want while preserving the functionality. It’s super simple! 🙂
Sounds great but just can’t get it to work at all.
Followed the instructions multiple times but when using tick boxes and comment boxes they don’t show in the email and the submit button doesn’t work from any Outlook email address we have tested.
Real shame because it’s just what we wanted
Sorry to hear that, Robert. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work with every email client, and it looks like Outlook is one of them.
Thank you for the great post!
Great article!
Just one question.
What happens when the recipient hits SUBMIT? Do I receive an email with the recipient’s data (email, name, etc) and the results of my survey?
My issue is that I would like to embed a couple of questions with radio buttons and write the results in a CRM like Mailchimp or another. Since I’m using a CRM (Sendinblue) to send an email to a list, I don’t want to force the recipient to write her email in a Google Form, be it within the message or in a browser’s window.
When I try to integrate Google Forms with the CRM via Zapier, without including the email field in the original google form, Zapier doesn’t find any data whatsoever and this is why I would want to use your solution. But again, what happens after the recipient hits SUBMIT?
Best regards,
Hi Marino. Since this method describes the integration of email and Google Forms, when one presses “submit”, the infos are sent to the corresponding Google form. If your form doesn’t ask for a recipient’s email, their email address won’t be submitted to the form.
Hope this helps.
Gill
Hey, this is amazing thank you so much. These are my issues:
1. I used Google docs to clean up the text and couldn’t find any of the ^p you mentioned, so some of text is still not super cleaned up but i can do that manually
2. The buttons for multiple choice disappear when I preview the code snipper. Everything else shows, the text, the submit button they show, but the selection boxes aren’t working.
Would appreciate your help with this. Thanks!
Hi Haya,
Glad you found it useful. Re your question: It’s almost impossible to tell what’s wrong with the code without looking at it. But it’s odd that you weren’t able to find the occurrences of ^p. Have you seen the section “Important” under the screenshot in the Step #4? You shouldn’t be looking for occurrences of 3 characters “=”, “^”, and “p” but for line breaks.
Maybe it’s worth having another look at that “Important” section. That’s usually the reason why one can’t find ^p (which are definitely there).
Hope this helps,
Gill
You are the best!!!
Thanks, Melissa 🙂
Hi Gill,
I tried the steps you showed, and it ALMOST worked. But every time after clicking ‘save’, Klaviyo seems to remove certain codes that hide the multiple choice / drop downs and also the submit button – making the form only plain text.
Any idea if this works on Klaviyo / any possible errors that you could think of?
Thanks!
Hi Melissa,
My apologies for the belated response. Unfortunately, I don’t even know what Klaviyo is, sorry 🤷 And whatever possible errors I could think of I’ve listed in the section “Troubleshooting: What to do if your form doesn’t work”.
Hope you’ll be able to find / have found a solution.
Cheers,
Gill
Hi Gill,
I followed all the steps you listed and even though the Google survey looks embedded in Gmail when I try to answer the questions, it still takes me to the email’s own web page. What might have I done wrong?
I was reading this and vaguely remembered I saw a tool that extracted the form HTML automatically, googled and I found it! https://stefano.brilli.me/google-forms-html-exporter/ It’s from 2017, but as far as I know it still works.
Hello!
I have been able to get everything to show up in the email except the actual questions/submit button, I am using MyEmma. I tried doing one step at a time and testing the code each step, but it didn’t look right at all either just showing code or unformatted words up until I got to the last step, where when input it all looks right expect for the complete absence of the actual questions and submit button!
Do you have any advice on that, or do you have an example code that works that I could try to compare with it?
Thanks!!
Hi Erica,
Do you observe this even if you don’t follow the last step (i.e. don’t remove branding / customize the way the form looks)? If that’s the case, then it means that MyEmma doesn’t allow particular parts of the code.
But if the questions and “submit” button show up after Step 5 but disappear after Step 5 1/2, then it does sound as if something got messed up while changing the code.
I don’t have any sample code that works as an example, unfortunately. But when this happens to my code, I simply copy-paste it in the email software after each clean-up step, saving the previously working state of the code in a separate file so that I can always go back to the working state and repeat the change.
Hope this helps.
Hey,
Is it possible that the receiver can open the Google form by any chance. I don’t want to expose Google form, the recipient should only see the survey and no hidden link.
Hi Niharika,
I’m not sure I understand your question. You say you’d like the receiver to be able to open the Google from. But you also say you don’t want to expose the Google form…
If you mean that you’d like the user to see only the form itself, without knowing that it comes from Google form, it’s possible, but only in theory.
You can style it visually as if it’s just a form (your own branding + no link to Google forms whatsover). But:
1) Whether a receiver will be able to fill out the form from their email client (i.e. whether the form will be interactive for them) depends on the device and browser / app a receiver opens it on (please see the post / other comments for details). So, for those who won’t be able to do that, you need to add a link like “Form doesn’t work? Fill it out here” where you give them a link to the Google form directly.
2) The moment they click the submit button, they get a message telling them that they’ll be submitting their data to Google forms and asking them to confirm. This dialog is impossible to remove.
Hope this helps.
Gill
Hi this didn’t work for me it went to spam because when I tried to send it to myself it would not let me check the box “include form in email” is there a work around for that.
Hi Rachel. Sorry to hear it didn’t work for you. I’m afraid I don’t have enough info to say what went wrong exactly. It’s possible that this solution doesn’t work with your device or software. You’ll find some common problems and solutions described in the “Troubleshooting” section.
In the SEND FORM window, why not choose the Send via -> “Embed HTML” to get the code? Wouldn’t that be easier than Send via email and hustle to clean up the code?
With “Embed HTML” option, you don’t get the full HTML representation of the form but just one short
Thanks so much!
My pleasure.
THANK YOU! I tried in the past o find a solution for embedding surveys in email and gave up after not finding any answers. Today I decided to give it another shot and see if the internet evolved in its collective knowledge and was not disappointed. This post is gold! <3
Great to hear this, Lilian 🙂 Glad you found the article useful.
This post has been tremendously helpful for me at work. And it’s very well-written & easy to follow along. I use python to send out automated emails (email template is in HTML) and needed to embed a google form and this worked like a charm!! Thank you so so much.
Hi Emily. My pleasure… and thank you so much for taking the time to let me know 🙂 It’s always great to hear that my posts made a difference in someone’s day.
This is amazing. Thank you. Only problem is that something is not quite right with the submit button. When clicked, it brings the person back to the original Google form and doesn’t record the response. Any idea why? THANKS!
Hi Elizabeth. I’m afraid it’s impossible to say what exactly is the problem. But when your “Submit” button doesn’t work, it’s a sign that the HTML code has errors. Probably, while you were removing parts of it, you have removed too much or added an extra character.
I’d suggest going through the whole process again, but testing the form every time you remove a piece of code. This way if you remove too much, you’ll be able to identify when that happened, reverse this particular step and try again without having to start from the beginning.
Hope this helps.
Thank you! I will definitely try this again as it would be so helpful to get more responses!
Elizabeth
Hey Gill!
I also used this method but I was wondering if it is possible that no new tab with the confirmation message opens. Do you know if thats possible somehow?
Hey Lori. I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The confirmation message has nothing to do with Google Forms, but comes from the email software (for ex., Gmail) itself, and I don’t think there’s a way to suppress it.
Do you know if it works on Substack ?? Thank you
Sorry Manuel, no idea. Never heard of Substack.
Hi Gill,
Thanks for posting this–very informative! Do you know if there happens to be a way to do this with Microsoft Forms?
Hi there. Unfortunately, not. I’ve never tried doing this with Microsoft Forms.
Hello! This has honestly been an eye-opening experience. I love it! I am, however, struggling with the =^p part we are supposed to find and replace. Are the =^p each individual characters we are supposed to remove? For example: replace = with nothing?
Hi Anna. =^p doesn’t stand for a sequence of 3 characters, “=”, “^” and “p”. It stands for “=” plus a line breaks. So, this substitution should remove all characters “=” followed by a line break.
In MS Word, line breaks are marked as “^p”. If you’re using another editor, it can be another characters.
Please see Step 4.1, gray box under the first screenshot.
Great job! Thanks, u really solve a huge problem in feedback campaigns.
My pleasure, Rodrigo 🙂
This worked perfectly! Thank you so much!
My pleasure, Sarah. Glad it worked.
Wish I had known from the beginning that it wouldn’t work in MailChimp! I attempted twice before I read that part. Oops!!
Awesome post! Worked like a charm. Thanks a lot
My pleasure, Stefan. Glad it worked.
Thank you so much!! This tutorial was extremely helpful. I have been wanting to add a poll to my email for a long time, but could never figure it out. THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I love all the photos too. 🙂
My pleasure. Glad you found it helpful, Joanna 🙂
Sorry, had a brain sneeze there – put left the wrong email address! Anyway — so, yes, is it possible to embed simple gform questions in the body of a normal gmail message?
Many thanks
Paul
Hi Paul. I have no idea, to be honest. But if you’re sending this survey from your Gmail address, I’m assuming it’s not a marketing message, and people you’re sending it to know you. Then, you can just add a link to the survey, and I’m sure they will make that effort and reply.
If you’re trying to send a newsletter from a Gmail address to a lot of people at once, this is a bad idea, because it will most probably will be flagged as spam anyways and your recipients won’t even get to see your email. In this case, I recommend to register for the free plan of an email marketing software (for ex., MailerLite).
Gill
This totally worked for me, EXCEPT, on questions on my survey where I allow a paragraph answer, the survey shows a long, black box for that area. Weird. And none of my html savvy guys here at home can figure out how to get rid of it.
Sorry to hear that, Laurie. Actually, the html savvy guys should have been able to sort out that one… I haven’t heard of this problem before, so don’t have any suggestions for you here, unfortunately.
This was amazing and incredibly helpful, but when I sent myself a test, I could select the answers and it looked great, but I couldn’t actually submit the responses at the end of the survey.
Hi there. Glad you found it useful. What do you mean by “couldn’t actually submit the responses”? You click on the button and nothing happens?
Also, could you please give me some more details on your setup, like:
Thanks.
Yes. I’d click on the button, but nothing would happen. I checked the Google form responses to be sure. Still 0 responses.
I’m using Active Campaign to send the campaign. Using a Mac to submit the response. I also tried with an iPhone. I still couldn’t submit unfortunately.
I tested with Outlook and GMail.
Well, the most likely reason for this would be that you accidentally deleted too much and broke the form itself. So I’d suggest first testing this without any changes to the form.
But if you inserted it as it is, haven’t deleted anything and it still doesn’t work, then I’d recommend looking at the errors that the browser throws when you press the “submit” button (in Chrome, More tools -> Developer tools -> Console).
Hope this helps.
Using mailjet I am completely unable to get this to work unfortunately. I can embed the whole survey using the embed link given by google, but it is not customizable and I can’t remove any elements of the form. Upon following the directions all of the formatting gets undone, several dropdown options become misspelled.
I have a very basic HTML knowledge, not nearly enough to rebuild the survey much less create my own along with a way to record responses.
If you could give any help or thoughts I would greatly appreciate it!
Hi Ethan. Sorry to hear you’re having problems with this, but I’m afraid it’s impossible to say what’s going wrong without seeing the survey code and replicating the steps in Mailjet. It does look like you’d need someone with advanced HTML/CSS knowledge to look at it.
Gill
While this is a nice trick, it’s not very practical. – All the issues with the various email platforms aside from gmail are one big issue .. but the Biggest Issue is that over 60% of people that read most emails do so from a mobile device, and this hack while a good attempt, does not work on any mobile device. So, it ends up being alot of code tweaking, and testing, for not. – Thx though for the attempt.
Hi there Geoff,
It’s certainly won’t work in 100% of the cases. But as you can also see from the comments, many people found it useful. It’s especially useful for bloggers or really small businesses that have only a few questions to ask.
Re the issue on mobile:
Although your subscribers can’t answer the survey directly from a mobile device, they see the questions displayed in the email. And this also increases the response rate in comparison to if you just gave them a link (assuming you added a line “Can’t answer directly in the email? Click here>>”).
Your subscribers may see that these are interesting questions or indeed a 3-question survey, so they are more likely to take a minute to answer them then if it was just a link.
I wasn’t planning to save the world with this post. I developed this hack for a friend, and has also been using it myself after that. I was actually surprised how many people have found it useful.
Great article!
When I receive the email, fill out the form and click submit I get the data but nothing happens on the page like: “Thank you for filling out the survey” – Is there a way to have an automated message that lets them know the form was filled out correctly? Thanks!
Hi Mike. Normally, after your subscribers submit their data, they get redirected to the “thank you” page hosted by Google Forms that says “Thanks. Your answer has been reordered.” or whatever you specified it to say (you can do that in the settings on the Google Forms side).
I’ve never seen a case where there was no redirect happening, sorry. So no idea what may be going wrong.
Hi, thank you for the idea. I followed the steps and everything went well however the submit option at the end of the survey is not working. The error message says “invalid URL or link” can you help me on this.
Does this still work?
It should 🙂
Hi, thank you for the idea. I followed the steps and everything went well however the submit option at the end of the survey is not working. The error message says “invalid URL or link” can you help me on this.
Very good tip and I would like to use this as a confirmation email.
I’m thinking to have just 2 radio buttons with “agree” and “don’t agree”.
So in the Form Responses, I get a bunch of “agree” and a bunch of “don’t agree” submissions but I can’t see who agrees and who not.
Of course, I can ask them to put their email in the form again, but this is not foolproof.
I just want the email of the receiver next to their answer in my Form Response tab.
I’m thinking maybe if I sent out the email using Google script I can add the email address somehow in the body of the email ( form) so that the Form Response tab is picking up the email address and records this as well.
Do you think this is possible?
Hi Joris. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to record the email of the respondent without their explicit consent (i.e. without making them explicitly input it in an input field). Because you just copy-paste code from the third party, this code doesn’t store any information about the email address of the recipient. Not sure about Google script, as I don’t have any experience with that, but many email providers block things like that, and your email may land in spam.
But regardless of that, I’m not sure a survey is a right tool to use for a confirmation email. Why not just use the usual confirmation emails from your email marketing software?
Hello, Gill! And greetings everyone!
First of all, thank you a lot for providing this detailed tutorial!
And i see you have helped a lot of people with the troubleshooting in the comments, great job!!
I am curious about how much this way of sending a survey reflects on the obtained traction. Has any of you actually measured the effect of embedding the surveys in the email and noticing a big difference in the number of responses achieved?
One more question that maybe you, Gill, any of the readers knows, from my testing the submit button works properly only for Gmail users (at least those that use the Gmail in a browser or the App), is there a way to know if an email address (e.g. from my mailing list) is a G Suite domain? i.e. they use a non @gmail.com address but the email service is provided by Google.
Knowing this would be great in order to target only the people that are actually able to fill the form from their email and do no frustrate the rest of the audience (don’t know if that really happens or it just makes them more engaged even if they have to fill the answers twice, one time in the email and one in the form because the submission in the email didn’t work).
Kind regards
Hi Victor. Happy to hear you found this tutorial useful. I’m afraid, I don’t have any definite answers for you. I didn’t conduct any comparison tests to see whether an embedded survey gets more answers. And I don’t know how to determine whether it’s a G Suite domain, sorry 🤷
OMG it’s not often that a website will have a step by step tutorial that works! I usually have to go search some more or troubleshoot to finish the task. But this worked PERFECTLY!! Thank you so much for this! I can’t believed it worked on the first try! I
Haha. I know what you mean, Shavaun. My pleasure. Glad you were able to make it work quickly.
Hi Gill,
Thank you for the info, but I’m having trouble downloading the original message. Keep getting a .eml file instead of a .txt, and the .eml file doesn’t have the HTML elements (such as “=^p”).
I’m using Firefox btw.
Hi Diogo,
I’m guessing you’re clicking “Download message” from the settings drop-down. What you should click first is “Show original”:
Then scroll down, and then click “Download original”:
Hope this helps.
Gill
Hi, Gill- First, thanks so much for sharing this! I tried to do this with SendInBlue and got the form to appear in the preview, but when I sent myself a test email, the form wouldn’t show up at all. It just displays “Loading…” in the space where it should appear in the newsletter. Have you had this happen? Any thoughts about what might be going wrong? Thanks so much!
Hi Lauren,
My pleasure. Sorry to hear you’re having troubles implementing this. Unfortunately, I have no experience with SendInBlue and have tried this only in MailerLite. Every email software has its own restrictions regarding HTML. For example, this won’t work in MailChimp because they block the
Hi Gil,
Thanks so much for this. I just scrolled through the comments to see if someone else was having a similar problem as me. Someone did, but never saw the solution.
I was able to get the survey into MailerLite, and it looks good enough. But when I send out an email and hit the “submit” button to the survey, nothing happens and no results are recorded.
I know it’s hard for you to guess what I’m doing wrong, but any idea? I haven’t done anything to do the code except what you listed.
Thanks a ton.
Hi Ben,
Glad to hear you found the guide helpful. Re your question:
As you’re using MailerLite, there’s certainly the way to make the form work. The way you describe the situation, it looks like that, while removing the elements to customize your form, you’ve also removed something that was vital for the form to function. I saw this happening before.
I would suggest the following:
1. Start by copy-pasting the code without any changes and change if the “Submit” button works (which it should if you’re using MailerLite).
2. Don’t remove / customize your form all at once but start removing things one-by-one:
(a) Remove an element (or two, if you feel confident)
(b) Retest the form:
Unfortunately, that’s the most concrete advice I can give you at this point.
Hope this helps.
I tried it and it’s not working for me. The checkboxes and submit button don’t show up?
Hi. Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say what may be going wrong without seeing the form itself. Have you checked the “Troubleshooting” section at the end of the post? It summarizes the common problems and offers some solutions.
Thanks! I did try but couldn’t find anything. It looks like Aweber, like Mailchimp, might not work with this solution unfortunately.
Hi Gill
Thank you very much for publishing this hack.
Everything is working up to Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional). After I select the elements I want to remove, I press DEL on my keyboard but nothing happens. Please tell me what I should be doing! I am using Mailerlite by the way.
Sam
Hi Sam,
My pleasure. Glad you found it helpful.
Re your question: It’s difficult to say what’s going wrong, as it depends on the form itself. Actually, selecting and pressing “DEL” as I showed on the screenshot should work. Maybe try to select and delete elements not in bulk but one-by-one. Or press BACKSPACE after you select an element.
Good luck!
Gill
Thanks Gill! Unfortunately it hasn’t worked but I have a tech friend who will be able to sort it out. Thanks again for a great hack.
Sam
Happy to hear that! Tech friends are the best 🙂
Hi
Is it possible to create survey where we collect name and email address (that is possible 🙂 so any user can leave his/hers contact, that will be stored in spreadsheet,
But when a user want to be deleted from that spreadsheet, can it be done so he can do that by himself through a form of some kind, without access to spreadsheet.
I as admin/creator can do that by deleting the entry, but can somehow user do that by himself?
Similar as you can register for newsletter and then deregister if you don’t like what you get.
Basically I need to collect some personal data for my operations, that user will give (like name, surname, address, phone, email – that can be done through simple survey.
But when registered user wants to be deleted from the list or just change provided data (let say different address) can in any way user do that by himself, without involving me to do that for him?
Hi Saso. I’m not a Google Forms expert, and embedding a survey in an email is my only experience with it. But I don’t think that user removing themselves from the list is possible with Google Forms. It’s just a simple forms solution, not a data management system.
When I was searching for how to do this, i was sure it was going to be a long shot.
You are a genius!
Thank you Sharon. I’m glad you found this useful 🙂
Hi again,
I’m having trouble implementing this – although I can see it work on the preview of the email, when I sent myself a test message it didn’t work.. could you help maybe?
Gill,
Great hack, thanks so much for sharing! While this worked for a few surveys I needed to do, I’m looking for my next survey to be embedded and submitted in the email, without any pop-ups, regardless of the respondent’s email address (i.e. Gmail).
It sounds like Google Forms will not support this. Is there another application or software you know of that supports this type of embedded survey and email submission? Preferably free…
Appreciate the help!
Sorry Mitch, Google Forms is the only tool I used to embed survey. So no idea whether there is a tool that lets you do the same without a popup.
I am just sending my form to 15 close associates and was trying to use my outlook account. I could not insert code using outlook. The only option they had was to attach as a file.
Any suggestions?
Hi Jasmine. I’m afraid this trick doesn’t work in Outlook, sorry.
If you’re using Outlook desktop:
1. Copy back to Notepad (or similar)
2. Save As (.htm)
3. Open email, click insert attachment
4. Select HTML file of form
5. Select “insert as text”
Hi Gus. Cool, thanks for the tip!
Hi Gil,
What a great solution, thank you so much!
I was able to embed the form, but when I try submitting the answers, it takes me to the Google Drive page and shows this error:
“Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.
Make sure that you have the correct URL and the file exists.”
Any ideas about what am I doing wrong?
Thank you!
Hi Polina. Google Drive considers Google Forms to be documents as well. So, the way I see it, the message you get can be caused by 2 things:
1) The form you’ve embedded in the newsletter doesn’t exist anymore.
2) You deleted a couple of characters too many so that the reference link to the form is wrong in the newsletter itself.
I would suggest to embed the form carefully deleting only the necessary things first (steps 1-5) and check if it works. Only then, if you’d like to customize the look, delete things one-by-one and test every time you remove something to prevent the form from breaking again.
Hope this helps.
Gill,
Can my clients answer the questionnaire in the email body itself?
Thank you
Hi Anna,
On desktop PC:
* The subscribers with Gmail/Googlemail addresses will be able to answer the whole survey within the email on their desktop PC.
* Others will be redirected to the survey in the browser as soon as they try answering anything.
On phones and tablets:
* The subscribers with Gmail/Googlemail addresses will be able to answer the whole survey within the email only if they’re viewing it in the browser but not the app.
Hope this helps.
Hey Gill!
First I would like to say… thanks for this great resource!
Second, I am having an issue with…
1.) My form appearing centered with the rest of my email. (I am using MailerLite).
2.) My form actually being able to record the submissions (The submit button isn’t working).
Any idea why this may be?
Thanks!
Hi Joshua. Glad to hear you found this useful.
The center position is triggered by styling that is off and can be fixed with CSS.
Re submission button not working: Have you looked through the troubleshooting section and tried the suggestions listed there? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say anything concrete about this without seeing the code.
Gill,
I managed to figure out the centering issue by just starting from scratch with the code and trying again and it seemed to fix it… I may have just erased something by mistake.
Regarding the submission… I tried embedding it without removing anything (i.e. the “Google Forms” logos at the top and bottom) and the submission worked so I must be erasing something important… are you aware of the line of code that needs to be included to prevent this issue from happening?
(sorry I am not to savvy with code)
Hi Joshua.
I’m afraid there is no definite answer to your question. Potentially, there are dozens of lines and hundreds (thousands?) of characters that if removed will break your form.
The best solution would be to ask a friend who understands HTML and CSS to help you out.
Hey Gill,
I connected with you a few weeks back. I was able to embed Google forms into my email. However, I cannot answer/reply on the form using the form. I tested one email to check if I could give my responses. It worked well on a desktop but not on the mobile device.
Any help here, please?
Hi Tanya. These forms don’t work on mobile devices (see my previous answers in the comments). It’s a limitation of Google Forms.
Okay. Thanks for the help 🙂
It’s alright! Thanks for all the help! 🙂
Hey,
I tried this method. It seems to be working well. Just that the multiple choice option round circles were missing! Can you please help me?
Hi Tanya. If everything else is working fine, the multiple choice options should be working too (I just created a form to double-check if they are generally working). Not sure how to help you at this point as I don’t know your form. The only thing I can think of: If the multiple choice options don’t work in a “clean” version of the form (i.e. without you deleting anything), try substituting the multiple choice options with a drop-down.
Hope this helps.
Hey Gill,
I did everything as it was mentioned in the post. Followed all the coding steps too. I am using Mail chimp for my email campaign. Sure. Will give the drop-down option a go and see if it works. Thanks for the prompt reply 🙂
Oh, so you are using MailChimp and the form seems to partially work? That’s interesting because some people tried doing this in MailChimp, and it didn’t work at all. I later had a look at it, and it seems like this isn’t possible in MailChimp at all. See this comment here:
https://gillandrews.com/embed-a-survey-in-email-newsletter-google-forms/#comment-1396
Hey Gill,
Yes, it partially works for me. Just the radio buttons are not visible. Anyway, I will still try it with other options, like the drop-down as suggested by you and let you know. Thanks a lot for the help!
Cool. Yes, please let me know how it goes. I’ll be adding a Troubleshooting section to this post and it would be helpful for others to know that it can work in MailChimp as well. Thanks so much in advance 👍
Hey, Gill
It does work partly with drop-down. However, the radio would still not work. Also, right after saving the coded part in Mailchimp. It automatically removes my coding and replaces it with plain text. So, I don’t think it is possible on MailChimp!
Sorry to hear this, Tanya. Unfortunately, that’s how MailChimp treats these forms. 🤷
Great post, Gill! This is exactly what we’re looking to do for a regular e-newsletter we send out to prospects. I’ve followed your steps, but am having the issue of the Submit button not working once embedded in the email. We use Pardot as our email marketing software. Any tips to make it work?
Hi Rachel. I must admit I’ve never heard of Pardot, so I’m not sure whether it has any specific issues with forms like that. Generally speaking, you could check if:
1) The form works without applying instructions in Step 5 (i.e. in its original form, without removing or changing things). Otherwise, it may have happened that you’ve removed too much of the code.
2) All the characters in the form labels and in-formm text are displayed properly. We had a case where someone was creating a form in French. It got screwed up in the the original_msg.txt file and had to be manually corrected in the final version of the form to make it work.
3) Your email software generally doesn’t allow HTML forms. This is the case with MailChimp, for example. I just did a Google search on this, and Pardot say they don’t recommend it but they don’t say it’s generally impossible. (So if this info is up-to-date, this shouldn’t be an issue). Here’s the article that talks about embedding forms in Pardot emails.
Hope this helps.
I’m using Zoho CRM and also having a problem with the embedded form – I was able to fill out all of the data within the email, but in the final step – “Submit”, no confirmation screen and no information / responses were recorded in the Google Survey. I tried this before removing the Google branded content at the beginning and end (the optional deletions), and also tried after removing the branded content – and nothing. It there a work-around?
Hi Shimite. I’ve never heard of Zoho CRM, sorry. Have you checked for the special characters within the labels and the text in the form and are you sure your system allows embedded forms (if they don’t you will probably find it explicitly stated somewhere on their website)?
Great hack!
I am trying to embed google form with Outlook. any tips?
Hi Mariah. I have no idea how this would work in Outlook, sorry. But if you are sending your survey to multiple people and you have a website, I recommend using a (free) email marketing software (even if you are sending this to 5 people). See my previous comments for details.
I love it thank you 🙂
My pleasure, Jorge 🙂
Hey Gill, Thanks for this tip! When I try to use it, everything looks fine, but the questions are unanswerable. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong?
Hi Brian. Could you please specify what you mean by “unanswerable questions”? You can’t select an option or type the text in the answer box? Also, what software did you use to embed the survey and send the email and what device are you trying to answer it from (smartphone, desktop PC, tablet)?
I think I figured out the issue from another one of your answers. I was trying to use mailchimp. Basically the questions and answers would appear, but none of them could be clicked or selected.
Ah, ok, That explains. This hack doesn’t work in MailChimp, unfortunately.
This is VERY cool!! Is it possible to add it into an email via apple Mac Mail or in my gmail account? I don’t see an “insert Source Code” option. Thanks 🙂
Hi Katie. Glad you liked this hack 🙂
Re Mac Mail: No idea, to be honest. I’m an Android / Windows person. The only i-anything I ever owned was an iPad 3 that died years ago.
Re Gmail: I’m not sure I understand the question. Could you please specify what you are trying to do? Sending a survey via Gmail is an in-built function of Google Forms described in Step 2 of this article. But I’m guessing you are trying to do something else with Gmail.
If you could give me some more details re your plans for your survey I may be able to offer concrete advice.
Thanks for the speedy reply!! I primarily only use mac… So really trying to add to an email there. I wasn’t able to add it into a gmail email after all the copy either. I ended up just sending it via the forms email option. Looking into better options since it exceeded the max send limits. boo!! Thanks for the post!! I’ll be using it again 🙂
Ah, I see. Well, if you are sending multiple emails with a survey, I would suggest using an email marketing software and not an email client (Gmail, Mac mail, etc.). Not only your email will have better chances to pass the spam test and land in your recipients’ inboxes but you will also be able to see how many people have actually opened the email.
MailerLite (the one I’m using for my email newsletters and the one I made the screenshots for this post from) is easy to set up, free up to 1000 email addressees, and you can send unlimited emails. So even if it’s just 5 people you are trying to send the survey to, it’s worth it.
An important fact to keep in mind if you decide to go with an email marketing software: This hack doesn’t work with MailChimp.
All the best for your survey!
Gill, I found this link relating to my problem/comment. Looks like there may not be a solution between Google form and mobile devices (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/sDuJrUaKXSk). But if you find one, let me know. Thanks.
Gill, Cool hack! Question: when I try to complete the Google form via my iPhone and click on the “Submit” button, it does not give me the confirmation page. Instead, it forces me to open up Safari and then fill in the form again. That’s a frustrating UX. Do you know if others have had this problem and how to fix it? Thanks for whatever help you can provide.
Ah – I figured out my problem. I was trying to do it outside of Gmail. Got it – thank you!
Hi Franklin. Sorry for not having replied earlier. It was nighttime in Germany. Glad you figured it out.
Very cool hack. I’m having problems, though. The submit button doesn’t seem to work and the answer isn’t recorded in my spreadsheet. If I click on the “Fill Out in Google Forms” link in the email and choose an answer there, then it works, but answering directly in the email doesn’t seem to.
I thought perhaps I’d eliminated too much code when removing the Google-specific stuff, but I tried it again leaving all of that and it still doesn’t work.
Any suggestions?
Wow! Totally clever hack here Gill… Will definitely use this.
Thank you 😉
Glad you found it helpful, Isabel! 🙂
Hi Gill, I created a simple Client Satisfaction survey in Google docs.
I would like to be able to send this from my non-gmail email and not have the header say GOOGLE DOCS.
Each email would be sent individually to a client.
Thanks for any direction you might have.
Hi John. You mean Google Forms, not Google Docs, right? To show how to remove the header would require a lengthy answer with some screenshots. I would have to come back to you in the evening on this. Hope that’s ok.
Hi Gill, yes, Google Forms. I probably didn’t describe this well. The header once the survey is launched is great but in the body of the email the header is a rather clunky Google Forms header. Wondering if I can get the web page header to appear in the body of the email and also whether I can send the survey from my non-gmail business account. Whatever direction you can provide would be great. I don’t want to put you out. Thanks.
Hi John. Thanks for clarifying.
First, I won’t recommend sending emails to multiple people directly through your business account (Gmail or not), as mass sending of the emails may get marked as spam on the receiving end, and the people it’s meant to will never get to see your email.
So, I would recommend doing it using a proper email marketing tool (there are plenty of free options out there).
The advantages of using an email marketing tool for that would be:
I use MailerLite, which is free up to 1000 unique email recipients.
Regarding the situation with the Google Forms header, and that you’d like to exchange it with the header of your website:
If you aren’t using a visual editor like one that comes with MailerLite (or any other email marketing tool), you’ll need to remove some HTML code and write some new HTML/CSS code instead. As I don’t have the HTML code of your survey in front of me, I can’t tell you exactly what you need to remove. But any person with some understanding of HTML would be able to help you as soon as you show them the code of the survey.
If you send your email with the survey with MailerLite, for example, you can remove the header by simply selecting it and clicking DEL (like you would remove any other text). I’ve explained how to do that in this post. See subsection “Step 5 1/2: Remove unnecessary information (optional)”.
In an email marketing tool, you’ll be also able to add a header of your website to your email by drag-and-drop.
Hope this helps 🙂
Hi Gil!, Nice tutorial.
I am trying use the html in my ‘Netcore’, but what I got is almost the same HTML in my gmail. Any solution to this?
Thanks, Vijay. Sorry, I didn’t quite get your question. What do you mean by “use html in Netcore”? Could you please describe the exact steps you took and what the result of each step was?
Hi Gill,
I tried e-mail marketing tool Netcore, but it does not work.
Now, I am trying with MailChimp, however when I pasted the code in mailchimp the Google form structure is retained but the buttons(radio buttons, checkboxes) where missing. I can see only the questions and answer options without buttons.
Kindly help.
Hi Vijay. It seems like this trick doesn’t work in MailChimp. See this comment of mine to the similar question.
Nice hack! It really helped me out.
Awesome! Happy to hear that 🙂
Actually, I wasn’t able to use Word, since it displayed the document as rendered HTML, but there’s always good old emacs for text editing.
You mean when you copy-pasted the content of original_msg.txt into Word it displayed rendered HTML? I didn’t know it could do that.
When I opened the file from within Word (Windows 2016).
Ah, interesting. I opened it in a text editor (Notepad++) first and then copy-pasted the content in Word. Thanks so much for letting me know! I’ll mention it in the post to clarify.
Hi Gil !
Thank you for this tutorial ! I have managed to embed the survey into my newsletter (I also use Mailerlite) but the button “submit” doesn’t work and doesn’t record the answers when the campaign is sent. Do you know why?
Thank you for your help !
Julia
Hi Julia. It’s difficult to say without looking at the form itself but I would guess that you’ve accidentally removed too much code. Were you customizing the look of the form in MailerLite’s visual editor or by working with the raw code and removing HTML tags by hand?
Thank you for this quick reply ! I also did a test without customizing the look of the form and it doesn’t work either.
For customization I use the visual editor. I’m going to try one more time from the beggining !
Thank you for this quick reply ! I also did a test without customizing the look of the form and it doesn’t work either.
For customization I use the visual editor. I’m going to try one more time from the beggining !
Yes, I also wanted to suggest trying it out without customization first. But if you say it’s not working even without customization, that’s really weird. Can you send me the form from the Google Forms to contact (at) gillandrews.com? Thanks.
I have tried again all the process from the beginning and I have still the same result.
I have just sent you my form, thank you very much for your assistance, it’s really nice !
No problem 🙂 I got your form, thanks. I’ll look into it and respond via email.
Hi Gill!
Absolutely love this! So like Julia I am having the same issue. It all looks good when I put it into MailerLite but when I send it the Submit button will not work and no responses are recorded. Were you ever able to figure out the issue?
Thank you for sharing this with us!
Hi there Molly 🙂 Yes, we were able to figure out the issue. She was writing the survey in French, and the special characters of the French alphabet got screwed up in the “original_message.txt”. The way to fix it was simple: Just correct the text of the questions right there, in the MailerLite editor.
Could you please verify that the text of your survey’s questions is displayed properly in both: MailerLite editor dialog on the right and the main preview dialog on the left? If it still doesn’t help, feel free to send me the survey the same way Julia did and I’ll look into it.
No worries. Hope this helps 🙂
Hi Gill, great article! I’m trying to embed a google form in a MailChimp email and am wondering if you’ve ever done this. When I pasted the html into the backend of MailChimp it didn’t properly transfer the form capabilities, just the text.
Hi Emerald,
Thanks 🙂 I didn’t try this solution with MailChimp before, but I had an old MailChimp account, so tried to replicate this just now.
Unfortunately, it looks like my solution isn’t going to work with MailChimp. But it seems like they have native survey integration that you can use:
Read the full article here: https://kb.mailchimp.com/campaigns/design/limitations-of-html-email
Hope this helps.
Hi,
This sounds great and exactly what I was looking for. However I need to embed the survey in a reply to only one person. I don’t use Mailer Lite, just gmail’s own email compose window. Any idea how I can paste the source code into that?
Hi Sasha,
Does it necessarily have to be a reply or can it also be a new email to that person’s email address?
If latter is the case, you could just go to your Google Forms, open the survey you’d like to send them and press “Send” button (at the right -top corner). Then enter their email address and tick a checkbox “Include form in email”.
Like this:
Alternatively, you could send the form to yourself and then try to copy-paste the part with the survey from that email into your reply. I haven’t tried this out, so not sure if this will work. But it’s your best shot, as I don’t think you can paste HTML code in a Gmail email.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, I appreciate your inputs and effort.
I’d already tried sending it to myself and copy-pasting
the form. I wasn’t fully satisfied with it and wanted to edit
out some portions of the form.
In any case, thanks again!
I see. Well, it means you would need to paste HTML code into Gmail.
Maybe this can help. This is apperently how you can paste HTML into Gmail:
See the full article here: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/3554/how-to-paste-raw-html-into-an-email-in-gmail
You can create an HTML code snippet the way I suggested in this article. To prepare it beforehand, you can use anything that renders HTML (for example, create a dummy post on your blog).
Wow. I appreciate this SO much. Going the extra mile to help!
Thank you.
Hey there,
Nice posts, exactly what I was looking for!
About embedding HTML in Gmail; I am doing Drafts in which using Plain Text mode I write directly the HTML code on them. Then you can use an email processor such as Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) to send emails automatically by selecting that draft.
It works and it is pretty easy 🙂
This is amazing!!! Thank you so much. I use MailerLite and was looking for a way to do just this… I’m going to share with all my author friends! 🙂
Hi Miranda. Great to hear you found it helpful! And with MailerLite, you will just need to follow the instructions.
If you run into any problems, just leave me a comment. I’ve used this method many times since I wrote this post. 🙂
hey Gill,
This is exactly what I was looking for. Although, when I’m editing orginal message and trying to remove =^p, ^p^p and 3D – I find nothing. Am I doing something wrong or did Google change something?
Thanks!
Hi Chris,
I just sent a Google Form to my gmail and checked again. I can still see 3D and =^p occurrences (see yellow and blue spots):
Fyi: The =^p part you will only be able to find if you use MS Word, as ^p stands for new paragraph and isn’t visible like the usual characters.
What happens if you use the code as it is, without removing 3D and =^p? Does it look ok or are there any problems?
Gill, this is a wonderful hack you discovered!
Just a question- why does the survey redirect to the Google forms page after a surveyor clicks the submit button? Is this problem unique to me?
Hi Janie. Glad you found this helpful. Re redirect on submit:
This has to do with 2 things:
1) How email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) react when some data is submitted from an email to an external destination (that’s why the pop-up window asking the users to confirm that they indeed want to submit the data)
b) The way Google Forms forms are designed. By default, all forms created will Google Forms will redirect to the “thank you” page of the corresponding form after the response is submitted. As I haven’t seen anything in the code of a form (the code that you paste into your newsletter) that triggers it, I assume it’s something that is triggered on the side of Google Forms after the response is submitted. Which would mean there is no way to prevent this redirect.
Hope this helps.
This is excellent – thanks for sharing!
My pleasure 🙂
Gill, this is one brilliant hack! I will use it for sure.
Thanks, Kitty! And I will show you how to style it so it fits your theme. You can make it look like anything you want while preserving the functionality. It’s super simple! 🙂