You may need to know who answered a survey—for follow‑up, support, incentives, or merging results with a CRM. In Responsly you typically combine one or more of these approaches: an identifying question, e‑mail invitations, or hidden variables on the share link.
Identify respondents with a survey question
The most direct approach is to ask for data only that person would know or that you issued to them: name, employee ID, ticket number, order reference, or another unique code.
Keep data minimization and consent copy in mind: collect only identifiers you truly need, and explain why you ask. For issuing per-person codes at scale, see Unique codes for each respondent.
Identify respondents with e‑mail invitations
With e‑mail survey invitations, you send links to addresses you already hold. When Form available only for e‑mail invitations is enabled in Settings, respondents typically open the survey only from that invitation link.
Each invitation link is set up for one completion; after submit, the response can be bound to the e‑mail address the invitation was sent to—so you know which inbox completed the form.
If you should not store identity tied to the address for that project, turn off Track recipient responses when sending invitations so the flow matches your anonymous design.
Identify respondents with hidden variables
Hidden variables (under Settings → Hidden variables) add parameters to the survey URL. Values are saved with each submission, so you can pass a customer ID, campaign tag, or unique token without showing a visible question—or combine them with personalized copy via Greeting the respondent.
Hidden variables are also helpful when you want to deduplicate or merge rows in exports using a stable key your systems already use.
