From: OSU Qualtrics Brand Administrators and OSU-OCIO Email Team
To: All OSU Qualtrics Users
Within the past few months we evaluated the best options to address issues related with emails distributed directly out of Qualtrics and being captured into recipients’ SPAM email boxes. In order to deal with these situations, we are planning to change the “From” email address in Qualtrics to qualtrics@osu.edu instead of the current email noreply@qualtrics-research.com
qualtrics@osu.edu is an OSU managed email. This email will not be associated with any particular survey or research protocols.
The timelines for this change are planned for the week of January 3 – 6, 2017.
We anticipate there will be no interruption to any survey protocols. We advise users to check their active surveys/projects/protocols during the week of January 9 – 13, 2017 to make sure that everything is working properly.
OSU-Email team and Qualtrics Technical team will perform testing right after the change. If the testing fail, we will resume to using the current “From” email: noreply@qualtrics-research.com
The Brand Administrators encouraged the Division Administrators to send this information to their users.
Additional resources can be found here:
– Email Distribution Management
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Best,
The OSU Qualtrics Brand Administrators
RESULTS
The Qualtrics Brand Administrators and OSU-OCIO Email Team performed additional testing after the change of the “From Email” address in Qualtrics.
Unfortunately, there were a couple changes that did not work as planned:
- Using the From Email as qualtrics@osu.edu displays differently based on how the survey is distributed to respondents. This creates confusion for respondents and increase the likelihood they would delete survey emails or view them as spam, rather than open and participate in the surveys.
- We identified a maximum threshold for outgoing emails where the From Name was set to qualtrics@osu.edu. This limitation is set by Microsoft as 10,000 emails per day. There are caveats around what counts toward this limitation, but it is too small for larger survey projects, and monitoring and properly managing this limitation for all OSU Qualtrics users is not feasible at this time.
Based on the negative impacts to Qualtrics users that the aforementioned findings represent, the Brand Administrators asked Qualtrics to back out the change. The Qualtrics system now works as it did before with respect to the From Name field.
Backing out the change means that Qualtrics users will need to take additional protocols and steps to increase deliverability of their surveys. The best practices shared in the resources below should be used by Qualtrics users when creating and distributing surveys:
– Email Distribution Management
Best,
The OSU Qualtrics Brand Administrators