We have updated our API and of course all the changes are non-breaking ;-). Beside the usual performance improvements, one of the changes worth mentioning here is the addition of the new “DateToBeMailed” field. This allows you to add multiple contacts to a survey but have them invited at different times.

This can be useful for several different scenarios:

• You may want contacts to receive an e-mail invitation at a certain time of day in their time zone to improve response rates. Some large companies process transactions from the day in batch at night. During the batch process, they call our API to send out e-mail invitations to customers with which they had contact. This works great, but it also means that the mails go out during the night. Unfortunately 3am is not a great time to send an e-mail. The recipient only sees it in their mailbox in the morning, under a pile of other mails and newsletters that have arrived during the night. Setting the mail to arrive at 10am in the recipient’s time zone will increase the chance that they see it and open it.
• You may have a transaction, like an online- or phone sale where the transaction is not really complete until the purchased items arrive. In that case you want to delay the e-mail invitation from going out so that the customer can evaluate the whole process including delivery.
• You may be a travel agency. Customers book with you well in advance. In that case you only want the e-mail invitation to go out once the person returns from their journey.

I’m sure there are many more scenarios that our user base will think of. If you have a good one, please share here below…