Hi, I´ve read a lot about hidden fields as a way to identify respondents, but I need some help on this.
I do have an excel sheet with several data (surname, name, email,...) and I need to identify who has answered the typeform via their email. I don´t work with mailchimp or any other CRM tool so far.
How coud I use the hidden fields with my excel sheet?
Could I just try to do it using Outlook as on the video for hidden fields?
And finally, once I´ve created the hidden field, I don´t know how to launch the email to get a different email for everyone.
Thanks a lot¡¡¡
Best answer by john.desborough
@Javier.Rubio_Coach - one possible option to avoid using a crm system would be to look into using an add-on to Excel or Google Sheets like Document Studio to help.
I’ll use Google sheets in this example:
you can create your link to the typeform with hidden fields using the concatenate function as shown in the image below - if you look at the formula in the upper left of the images you will see how i pulled the fields together into the string to pass to the to the typeform - as hidden fields
i added a couple of columns in the sheet to provide the ‘separator text’ between the field content so that the string was easy to assemble.
i use Document Studio to generate reports and send out emails from Sheets, and you can do that with this link (there is a version for excel as well) and you can set up Doc Studio to send emails on a one time basis or on an hourly basis if more are going to come in.
here is a quick little video that explains what i did and how you might want to explore this..
In order for the hidden fields to work, you need to have a way to pass the information into the URL. Since you’re working off an Excel sheet that won’t automatically add the information to the URL, you would need to manually type it into the URL before sending that URL to your respondents via Outlook.
As for launching the email, you would need to send these individually through Outlook in order to add a different URL into the email. If possible, I would definitely suggest using a system like Mailchimp (they do have a free plan you can try out!) to save you some time so you don’t have to do so much manual work.
@Javier.Rubio_Coach - one possible option to avoid using a crm system would be to look into using an add-on to Excel or Google Sheets like Document Studio to help.
I’ll use Google sheets in this example:
you can create your link to the typeform with hidden fields using the concatenate function as shown in the image below - if you look at the formula in the upper left of the images you will see how i pulled the fields together into the string to pass to the to the typeform - as hidden fields
i added a couple of columns in the sheet to provide the ‘separator text’ between the field content so that the string was easy to assemble.
i use Document Studio to generate reports and send out emails from Sheets, and you can do that with this link (there is a version for excel as well) and you can set up Doc Studio to send emails on a one time basis or on an hourly basis if more are going to come in.
here is a quick little video that explains what i did and how you might want to explore this..
