Email templates

=Introduction=

The email templates are used to quickly send personalized invitations, reminders, confirmations, and registrations emails to your respondents (from the survey participants table). You can also edit the standard basic (or detailed) admin notifications that are sent to the survey administrators.

To access it, go to the survey settings and click on the Email templates tab:



If you have the superadministrator permission (you have access to the global settings of your LimeSurvey installation), you can change the Default HTML editor mode for all your LimeSurvey users. For further details, continue reading the following wiki subsection.

=Email templates panel=

The email templates panel looks like this:



As it can be observed in the screenshot, the "HTML source" editor mode is used. To change it, check your personal account settings.

As you can observe, five types of emails can be send to the users or admin(s):
 * Invitation
 * Reminder
 * Confirmation
 * Registration
 * Basic & detailed admin notifications

Invitation
The invitation system is useful when you wish to send emails in bulk to all the respondents from your survey participants table who have not yet received an invitation to complete your survey.

From the email templates panel, you can edit the message that reaches out those survey participants. To check which email placeholders can be used, continue reading the following wiki subsection. You can also use the ExpressionScript to enhance the customization of your invitation email template.

Reminder
The reminder system helps survey administrators remind their respondents from the survey participants table to answer to the survey.

You can edit the default format of the reminder email from the email templates panel. To check which email placeholders can be used, continue reading the following wiki subsection. The ExpressionScript can help you better customize the text body of this email template.

Note: A reminder will be sent only to those participants where the "Completed" field is turned off (this means the respondent has either not taken or completed the survey) in the survey participants table.

Confirmation
If tokens are used and a participant fills out the survey, a confirmation email will be sent to his/her email address. You can deactivate this functionality from the Participant settings panel.

Click on the Confirmation tab if you wish to edit the email template. Check the email placeholders to see which ones can be used in this type of email. You may also use the ExpressionScript to enhance your email customization.

Registration
If the closed-access mode is enabled (there is a survey participants table, which means that only those participants who have an allocated entry and a unique token code associated to it can complete the respective survey. If you allow participants to publicly register to your survey, a new entry in your survey participants table will be created once the respondent has submitted his or her name and email address. A script that runs in the background will automatically send the respective respondent a registration email. It contains the URL with the token that needs to be accessed by the newly registered user.

Click on the registration tab to edit the format of this email. Don't forget to take a look first at which email placeholders can be used within the text body. The ExpressionScript can provide further customization to the body text you wish to use.

Basic & detailed admin notifications
To get admin notifications, click on the Data management tab and type in an email address in the "Send basic admin notification email to" and another one (or the same) in the "Send detailed admin notification email to" field.

By default, the only difference between the two is related to the extra placeholder {ANSWERTABLE} that is included in the detailed admin notification email template. This allows the user who receives these kind of emails to also check the submitted answers without being needed to access the LimeSurvey installation.

However, by using the ExpressionScript and the email placeholders you can customize these two email templates however you want.

=Email templates fields=

Each email template contains:


 * The subject of the email: The title of the email/batch of emails you want to send;


 * The email body: It is a text box that contains the text message you wish to send to the users. It may contain text, images, and email placeholders. Moreover, the ExpressionScript can be used to further enhance the message you wish to deliver;

Note: You may have observed that another tab is displayed above the tab with the email templates tab if your survey uses additional languages. If you click on another language tab other than the default language one, the email templates will load the corresponding texts in the respective language. Now, access each email template in order to start editing them. Do not forget to click on the Save button located in the upper-right part of the screen to get all your changes saved.


 * Email actions: Two actions are available:
 * Reset this template: Once clicked, the HTML code gets reset. No text is deleted;
 * Validate expressions: It checks the logic of the email - whether the placeholders are correctly used or not. It is highly recommended to use it before sending a batch of emails. You can see in this way whether the placeholders are correctly defined or not. In the below example, a small typo exists - it is emphasized in the red colour:



=Email placeholders=

As you can see in the default email templates, different email placeholders are used either in the body and/or the subject of the email. Their role is to connect the email you wish to send to each respondent entry from your survey participants list. The data from the survey participants table (e.g., email, first name, last name, token, etc.) is automatically taken and put into different unique emails before being sent to each respondent from your survey participants list.

You can find below the email placeholders that are allowed to be used within the body message of your invitation and reminder email templates. When sending out the emails, these email placeholders will be already replaced in the preview of your invitation/reminder email with data from your survey and survey participants table.

The following placeholders are allowed in invitation/reminder email templates (subject and/or body fields) and they will be replaced while sending out the emails:

If your survey is not anonymous, the email placeholders can be used in order to add specific entry/participant data into the Survey text elements panel (e.g., survey description, welcome message, end message).

These email placeholders can also be used in the confirmation and admin notification email templates.

Certain placeholders can be used only within the the admin notification templates. Please note that one email per response will be sent to the email address of the administrator!

Some of the placeholders that can be used only in the admin notification panels are mentioned below:

Hints:
 * If your survey is using anonymized responses, then token-related placeholders will not work in the notification email template.
 * You can use ExpressionScript to use expressions for tailoring an email. Please have a look at the ExpressionScript how-tos for an example.
 * Also have a look at the examples on using Information from survey participants table.

Participant opt-out
When you use the {OPTOUTURL} tag in your invitation/reminder email, your participants have the possibility to opt out of this particular survey by just clicking on the related URL in the email - so you don't harass them with reminder emails. A participant that opted out of your survey will have the email status 'OptOut' set in the survey participants list.

=Using replacement function=

Some specific keywords can be used within your email templates. For example, certain keywords can be used in order to replaces the token URL address.

The below example uses a plain link to the survey instead of a long url:

1) First, access the email templates panel and choose Invitation.

2) Write the text you want to appear as link to start the survey.

3) Then select that text.



4) Add the placeholder for the plain link @@SURVEYURL@@ and choose other from the protocol-select-box.



Now, when you send out your invitation emails, the link to start the survey will be something shorter and not a long url.

= Email attachments =

File actions
When clicking on Add file the following window will pop up asking you to choose which document from the files folder you wish to send via email:



Attachments can be added at the bottom of the email template editing interface. Please note that email attachments are uploaded on a per survey basis.

You can also upload on the spot a file from the desktop to your LimeSurvey installation by clicking on the upload button and then selecting the file you wish to attach to the respective email template.

Once selected, double click on it and the file will be immediately displayed in the Files table, below the Add File button:



To have it permanently attached to the respective email template, do not forget to click on Save button located in the upper-right part of the window.

To decide if an attachment should be sent on an individual basis, it is possible to add a relevance equation to each attachment.

All functions supported by the ExpressionScript can be used, as well as token attributes if the survey uses tokens.

In case of a notification or confirmation template it is also possible to use question codes used in the survey.

If you wish to delete a file, click on the red trash button located under the Action column and save the changes.

Image attachment
You can attach an image/images if you send HTML emails. To do this, you need to update the URL source of the image by settings its path to your public directory of your LimeSurvey instance.