Managing Contacts & Audiences

Managing Contacts & Audiences

Contacts are the people you can send surveys to and collect responses from in SurveyTale. By organizing your contacts and enriching them with attributes, you can target the right people, personalize surveys, and analyze results by the groups that matter most to you.

This guide explains what contacts are, how attributes and segments work, how to import contacts, and how to use them to target your surveys. It focuses on the in-app experience rather than the developer API.

What are Contacts?

A contact is a record representing a single person in your SurveyTale workspace. Each contact can hold:

• Identifying information — such as an email address or a unique user ID.
• Attributes — additional details about the person (for example, name, plan type, signup date, or location).
• Response history — a record of which surveys the contact has been sent and how they responded.

Contacts make it possible to move beyond anonymous, one-off survey links and instead reach a known audience, follow up over time, and connect responses back to the individuals who gave them.

Contacts vs. anonymous responses

Not every response needs a contact. If you share a public survey link, anyone can respond without being a known contact. Contacts come into play when you want to:

• Send surveys to a specific, known list of people.
• Personalize a survey based on who the respondent is.
• Segment and filter results by audience characteristics.
• Avoid sending the same survey to the same person more than once.

Understanding Attributes

Attributes are the individual pieces of data stored on each contact. They let you describe your audience and power your targeting and analysis.

Common examples of attributes include:

• Email — the contact's email address.
• Name — first and/or last name.
• Plan or tier — useful for SaaS-style audiences.
• Signup date — when the person joined.
• Custom fields — any other data you want to track, such as region, role, or account status.

Attributes can be added when you import contacts, updated over time, and referenced when you build segments or personalize surveys.

Using attributes for personalization

Because attributes are tied to a specific contact, you can use them to tailor a survey to each respondent — for example, greeting a contact by name or adjusting which questions they see. Keep your attribute names consistent so they are easy to reference later.

Working with Segments

A segment is a group of contacts that share one or more characteristics. Segments let you target a survey at a meaningful slice of your audience instead of everyone at once.

You typically build a segment by combining attribute-based conditions, such as:

• Contacts whose plan equals a specific tier.
• Contacts who signed up within a particular date range.
• Contacts located in a specific region.
• Contacts who have (or have not) responded to a previous survey.

Segments are dynamic in nature: as contacts change or new contacts are added, they move in and out of a segment automatically based on whether they still match its conditions.

Why segments matter

• Relevance — people receive surveys that actually apply to them.
• Higher response rates — targeted surveys tend to perform better than broad ones.
• Cleaner analysis — comparing results across segments reveals differences between audience groups.

Importing Contacts

The fastest way to build your audience is to import an existing list. SurveyTale generally supports importing contacts from a structured file such as a CSV.

1. Open the Contacts area of your workspace.
2. Choose the option to import or add contacts.
3. Upload your CSV file containing one row per contact.
4. Map your columns to the matching SurveyTale attributes — for example, map a column named email_address to the Email attribute.
5. Review the preview and confirm the import.

Preparing your file

To make imports smooth, follow these tips:

• Include a clear header row so each column can be mapped correctly.
• Use a reliable unique identifier (such as email) so existing contacts are updated rather than duplicated.
• Keep attribute values consistent in format (for example, use the same spelling and casing for plan names or regions).
• Remove empty or test rows before uploading.

When you re-import a list, matching contacts are typically updated with the new attribute values, which helps keep your audience data current.

Targeting Surveys with Contacts

Once your contacts and segments are in place, you can use them to decide who receives a survey.

1. Create or open the survey you want to send.
2. When choosing the audience, select a segment or list of contacts to target.
3. Send or schedule the survey to that audience.
4. Review responses, which are linked back to the contacts who completed the survey.

Because each response is tied to a contact, you can later filter and analyze your results by attribute or segment to understand how different parts of your audience responded.

Best practices

• Keep contacts up to date — refresh attributes periodically so your segments stay accurate.
• Start with a few key attributes — you can always add more as your needs grow.
• Use segments deliberately — smaller, well-defined audiences usually produce more actionable results.
• Respect preferences — only survey people who expect to hear from you, and honor opt-outs.

Related Topics

Once you've built your audience, you may also want to explore:

• Viewing and analyzing survey responses, including filtering by attribute.
• Sharing and distributing surveys across different channels.
• Using AI insights to summarize open-text feedback (available on the Ultra plan).