Secure Custom Variables: Pass personal data into surveys without exposing it
Pass personal data into surveys without exposing it
Pass identifying data into survey responses, encrypted, even when you send through HubSpot or another external tool.
You can now attach data you already hold about a respondent, their email address, customer ID or account tier, straight to their response. None of it is readable in the link. Your feedback arrives already tagged with who it came from. And sending surveys through tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp or Braze is now safe to do with real customer data.
Learn more about Secure Custom Variables
Your data stays hidden in the link
Our Custom Variables have always let you pass data into a response through the survey URL, so it lands on the record without the respondent typing anything. The catch was the link itself. Those values sat in plain text, so anyone with the link could read them, and a respondent could edit them before answering. If you handle personal data, that ruled out passing anything identifying through an external tool.
We ran into this ourselves. Our own customer experience team wanted to trigger feedback surveys through HubSpot. There was no safe way to include a customer's email or ID without exposing it. So we built one.
Secure Custom Variables encrypt every value into a single token in the link. The data is hidden, it can't be changed, and if anyone tampers with the link, the survey won't load.
What you can do now
Pass identifying data safely
SmartSurvey encrypts all your variable values into one token. Nothing sensitive shows in the URL, and SmartSurvey rejects an altered link before the first question loads.
Send to your whole list through HubSpot, Mailchimp or Braze
Upload a CSV or TSV of your respondents and get back a file of unique encrypted links, one per row. Drop them into any mailing tool, up to 1,000 at a time.
Wire it into your own systems
A Developer tab gives you ready-made code in JavaScript, Python, C# and PHP, pre-filled with your variable names. Technical teams can create encrypted links programmatically.
How to turn it on
- Go to Build, then Custom Variables, and add your variable names, such as CustomerID, Email and Region.
- Select Enable Secure Variable Links. SmartSurvey creates an encryption secret for that survey automatically.
- Open the Generate Links tab and choose Single Link to enter values by hand, or Bulk Links to upload a CSV or TSV.
- Copy a link, or download them all as a CSV, then add them to HubSpot, Mailchimp, Braze or any mail merge tool.
- When a respondent opens their link, SmartSurvey decrypts the token and records the values with their response.
Only rotate your encryption secret if it's been exposed. Rotating it breaks every link you've already sent.
Secure Custom Variables are available now on Scale and our Smart Solution plans. If you're on one of these, open the Variables page to switch it on.
On a different plan? You'll see an upgrade option on the Variables page which will provide more details.
Learn more
Read the Secure Custom Variables help guide for a full walkthrough, including the developer code samples
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