When you are a law firm or a law department that wants to invite a plentiful group of prospects to take a survey, you will undoubtedly rely on a** bulk mailing application**. My only experience has been with Constant Contact, but I suspect that the comments below apply to any number of comparable applications, e.g., Dotdigital, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, Mailerlite, and Klaviyo.

You can easily copy an invitation e-mail, make changes, and keep track of your different ”campaigns.”

The software will tell you how many of the people opened the email invitation as well as how many of those who opened it clicked on which links in the invitation. Regarding multiple links, you might have a link for your website, one for the projected table of contents of the report, and one for the survey itself.

A significant convenience of Constant Contact is that at an interval you pick it will automatically resend to those who have not opened your first e-mail. I send invitations one week and set the automatic resend to go out the next week so that if people are on vacation, it will reach them when they return to the office.

The software will tell you which e-mail addresses bounced and which recipients unsubscribed from your emailing efforts. It will not resend to either of those categories.

The application does a good job of keeping track of your mailing lists, which it calls “contacts.” You can create contact lists for various purposes and slice and dice your lists.

One downside of Constant Contact, however, is that some law firms or companies block messages sent by that service. As far as I can tell, it is not possible to determine whether a message was blocked or whether the recipient never bothered to open it.

In a few situations, I have resorted to Gmail and emailed myself with blind carbon copies (bcc’s) to several people. That way, recipients do not see the names of other recipients, which would violate my confidentiality agreement with participants. For example, if I am writing to a few respondents who omitted a key answer, I might reach them that way, but limit myself to no more than five bcc’s. My understanding is that if you exceed a smallish number, the e-mail system of the recipient law firm or company might block you.

As a final note, the R programming language offers several free packages that enable you to fire off salvos of emails. So do several survey hosting packages, e.g., NoviSurvey.net.