Integrating SurveyVista with External CRMs: A Complete Implementation Guide

SurveyVista, a native Salesforce survey solution, provides seamless integration capabilities with external CRM platforms like HubSpot or any other external marketing platforms such as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. This powerful integration allows you to leverage your existing marketing automation tools while maintaining complete data integrity and response tracking within Salesforce.

The Power of Cross-Platform Integration

Modern businesses rely on multiple tools to manage their customer relationships and marketing efforts. Rather than forcing you to abandon your preferred marketing platform, SurveyVista bridges the gap between your external CRM or any other external marketing platform and Salesforce through intelligent URL construction. This approach ensures that every survey response is automatically captured and associated with the correct customer records in your Salesforce org.

Understanding the Integration

The core of this integration lies in constructing a custom survey URL that includes specific parameters. These parameters allow you to:

• Identify the survey being sent.
• Associate the survey response with a specific Salesforce record (e.g., a Contact).
• Set additional field values in the survey result record such as an external identifier in your CRM platforms like HubSpot.

Building Your Survey URL

To send a survey via an external tool like HubSpot, you’ll need to build a URL with the following components:

1. Base Survey URL: This is the standard link to your survey, obtainable from the SurveyVista interface.
2. Parameters:
   • recordId: The internal Salesforce ID of the survey.
   • logicalId: A unique key string for the survey.
   • targetId: The Salesforce ID of the record (e.g., Contact) you want to associate the response with.
   • additionalParams: Optional. Key-value pairs to set additional fields in the survey result record.

Sample URL Structure

Here’s what a complete survey URL looks like in practice:

Sending the Survey via HubSpot

Once you’ve constructed the URL:

1. Create an Email in HubSpot: Design your email template and include the survey link
2. Personalize the Link: Use HubSpot’s personalization tokens to dynamically insert the appropriate targetId and any other necessary parameters for each recipient.
3. Send the Email: Send the email to your desired contact list.

The key to success lies in using HubSpot’s merge fields to replace static values with dynamic data from your contact records. This ensures each person receives a survey link that’s uniquely tied to their Salesforce record.

Why This Approach Transforms Your Survey Strategy

This integration method delivers unprecedented flexibility and reliability for your survey operations.

• Flexibility: Integrate SurveyVista with any CRM platforms like HubSpot or marketing platforms such as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement that supports dynamic URL parameters.
• Data Integrity: Ensure that survey responses are accurately tied back to the correct records in Salesforce.
• Customization: Set additional fields in the survey result record to capture more context or metadata.

The approach eliminates common survey distribution challenges like broken tracking, mismatched responses, and manual data reconciliation. Your marketing team can focus on crafting compelling survey campaigns while your data team enjoys clean, properly attributed responses.

Expanding Beyond HubSpot

While this guide demonstrates HubSpot integration, the underlying methodology works with virtually any marketing platforms such as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Whether you’re using Mailchimp for email campaigns, Constant Contact for newsletters, or even custom-built marketing solutions, the same URL parameter approach enables seamless SurveyVista integration. The beauty of this method lies in its universal applicability. Any platform capable of generating dynamic URLs can become part of your SurveyVista ecosystem, giving you the freedom to use the marketing tools that work best for your organization

Additional Resources

For more detailed information on constructing survey URLs with parameters, refer to the SurveyVista Knowledge Base.
 
By leveraging this method, you can seamlessly integrate SurveyVista with HubSpot or any other CRM, ensuring a cohesive and efficient survey distribution and response tracking process.