How to Use In-Newsletter Polls to Engage With and Learn From Your Audience

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I love running surveys. If I can learn more about my audience — who they are, what they care about, what they like about my newsletter — then there’s so much I can do with that data. If readers tell me a new reason why my newsletter is valuable, I can use that to update my landing page with a more effective call to action. If readers tell me they struggle to solve a particular problem, I can use that information to launch a new product to solve the problem and sell it to the audience. I could also use demographic data from the survey to more effectively sell ads to potential advertisers or use open-ended feedback to create new content for my newsletter.

However, surveys have weaknesses. I’ve found that for most newsletters, getting anywhere from 2- to 5% of your audience to respond to a survey is pretty good. That means you’re only getting a snapshot of your audience — and survey respondents tend to be older, which means the survey may not represent your entire audience. Plus, your readers might suffer from survey fatigue if you constantly run surveys. Ask them to take a survey once, and a percentage of the audience will happily spend a few minutes sharing feedback. (They’ll be especially motivated if you offer a reward, like a gift card or a free ebook, in exchange for their participation.) But if you ask again and again, you may see the response rate dwindle to the point where the data you do get isn’t very helpful.

And then there are newsletter writers out there who are skittish about running any sort of survey. Maybe they feel daunted by the time and energy they think it will take to create a survey, let alone sort through the answers. Maybe it’s because they tried one in the past, and the responses weren’t very enlightening. Perhaps they’re worried about receiving negative feedback — or none at all. Maybe they are concerned about bothering their readers with an ask or dread that they will get actionable feedback that will add new items to their to-do list. 

This begs the question: What else can you do that allows you to learn what the audience wants without taking up too much of a reader’s time?

The answer might be using a poll.

Why polling works

If you’ve been to an airport or a sporting event recently — or more specifically, been to the bathroom at an airport or an arena — you’ve probably seen a great example of a poll in action. Many buildings have installed these feedback tools right outside the bathroom, featuring red, yellow, and green buttons, often with corresponding angry or happy faces. Push the red button to let the building managers know your experience was unpleasant. Push yellow and you’re saying things weren’t great but weren’t terrible. Push green, and you’re telling them that it was a nicer experience than you anticipated. Heikki Väänänen, the founder of HappyOrNot, a company that creates the tech behind these buttons, told the New Yorker that a single feedback unit can register thousands of responses in a single day. “We saw that if you make it easy, people will give feedback every day, even if you don’t give them a prize for doing it,” Väänänen said.

Imagine for a moment that instead of these quick polls, the airport or the arena tried to collect feedback another way. Instead of asking you to push a button, suppose they had an employee stand outside the bathroom to collect feedback from you directly: “Pardon me, sir, but do you have a minute to tell me about your urinal experience?” Or imagine that they sent you a survey via email afterwards asking you to fill out a few questions about the bathroom.

Unless your experience was remarkably unpleasant, what are the odds you’d make time to respond to that survey or that in-person request?

But that’s where polling becomes such a valuable tool. It’s one thing to ask for five minutes of someone’s time — it’s another to make it so that feedback can be collected in five seconds. 

These days, most email platforms make it easy to deploy polls so you can collect the feedback you need without asking much of readers. (And unlike those outside-the-bathroom polling buttons, these newsletter polling tools are perfectly safe for any germaphobe to use!)

What to ask in a newsletter poll

There are some who might use the words “survey” and “poll” interchangeably, so I’ll lay out my definition here: A survey typically involves multiple questions, with the data collected in a tool outside of the inbox. A poll typically involves a single question, with the data collected inside the inbox.

And since you only get to ask one question within that in-newsletter poll, you’ll have to decide which question you want to prioritize that day. (The good news: You can ask more questions afterwards. I’ll get to that tactic in the next section.) 

I might ask one of these types of questions:

Ask how readers felt about that specific newsletter edition

Many newsletters close with a quick question: “What did you think of today’s newsletter?” Then they’ll ask readers to choose an option, like a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or a rating on a scale of one to five stars. In the aggregate, all these responses should give you a good sense of how your newsletter performed that day. Here’s a great example from Nautilus, which asks readers to pick from one of three faces — happy, neutral, or sad — to describe how they felt about that day’s email.

I find that these types of polls are particularly useful for any newsletter where the reading experience takes place largely in the inbox. I call those types of products “destination newsletters,” since the destination is the newsletter itself, not a website or a link to another platform. Measuring the success of destination newsletters can be tough because you can’t rely on click rates to show you that the audience responded to the content. Someone opened, but did they read it? Like it? Even make it to the bottom of the newsletter? A poll like this can help you understand what readers thought.

This question is also great for new newsletter launches or design testing. Just ask readers: “What do you think of this newsletter so far?” Here’s a great example from WTF is SEO?, a newsletter about SEO for newsrooms. When they were in their early days, they’d often close issues with a question about whether the level of SEO insights and actions in their newsletter were too beginner, too advanced, or just right. A quick poll like that can help you understand audience sentiment and stay on the right track.

If the data suggests that you’re meeting expectations or delivering something valuable, that’s fantastic. If the responses indicate that readers aren’t enjoying your newsletter, that may be a signal to run a full survey to figure out what you could improve to better serve your readers.

Ask about your content strategy

What do readers want more of in their newsletter? Ask them to pick from a list of options and decide which topics they want to see more of like the team at Honolulu Civil Beat did in this poll:

You can even use a poll to help you choose the next topic for your newsletter. That’s something the team at Clean Plates tried: They gave readers a choice between two different recipes and then used that feedback to decide which should be featured in an upcoming newsletter. One perk of that strategy: Since readers have seen the story ideas in advance, they’ll already be looking forward to the next issue.

(Full transparency: Both Honolulu Civil Beat and Clean Plates are longtime Inbox Collective clients.)

Ask something to learn more about the reader

Let’s say you want to learn more about your readers’ ages, where they live, what they do for work, and what things (besides your newsletter) interest them. I love asking those types of big-picture questions in an end-of-year survey, but sometimes, you don’t want to wait until then to collect the data. That’s where a poll could be useful as a quick way to collect some information about the audience.

Savvy newsletter operators will use this data to segment their audience through a technique known as progressive profiling. That’s where you ask questions and then move readers into buckets based on their responses. (In most email platforms, you can do this using a “tag.”) Let’s say I want to identify readers on the Inbox Collective email list who’ve launched a newsletter outside of work — maybe I’m looking to sell an ebook to those readers and want to make sure I target the right audience. I might ask a yes or no question like “Do you have your own independent newsletter?” Readers who click on the “Yes” option would be tagged and then sent a special offer for that new product. 

Ask something to take the temperature of the audience

You could also use a poll to gauge how readers feel about a particular issue. I love how 802Ed, which covers education in Vermont, does this. Every week, they ask their readers to vote on a question regarding something in the news that affects educators. In the next issue, they share how the community voted.

A tactic like this is fantastic for a newsletter trying to start a conversation within its community. Readers can vote on the issue and then come back the next day or week to see if others in the community feel the same way. Sure, operators could do this in other ways, like inviting readers to write back with a letter to the editor, but that would probably only attract readers with the most time and impassioned viewpoints. A poll might do a better job of surfacing how the community, on the whole, feels about the issue.

What to do after the poll

When a reader clicks on an answer in a poll, you need to decide what you want them to do next. Some newsletters take readers to a webpage confirming that they’ve voted. Some get a bit more clever with the confirmation page — The European Correspondent, for instance, rotates through different cute animal photos, which encourages readers to vote again and again to see the latest photo.

You could do more with a confirmation page, too. Let’s say I tried the “Do you have your own independent newsletter?” question in my newsletter. On the confirmation page, I’ll learn more about who that reader is no matter which option they select. I can use that information to create two different landing pages, one for independent newsletters and one for everyone else, with links on each page that will be relevant to each audience. Instead of the confirmation page being a dead end, I’d be using the poll to direct readers towards some of my best-performing stories.

I like how The Donut, a daily newsletter that covers a mix of news topics, sends readers to a confirmation page where they can share more about why they answered the way they did. In one issue, they asked readers, “To all working professionals: would you consider the growth outlook in your industry/sector of the economy to be positive or negative over the next 12 months?” More than 3,000 people responded to the poll, but nearly 300 shared additional feedback, and The Donut turned that into a crowdsourced post showcasing some of the most intriguing answers.

Or, instead of a confirmation page, you could go another route and take a reader from a poll to a survey.

Yes, an in-newsletter poll usually involves just one question, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ask something more. You just need to do it outside the inbox.

Here’s a great example of this from 1440. When testing a weekend edition of their newsletter, they closed every edition with this question: “How do you like the 1440 Weekend Edition?” Readers could select a thumbs up or thumbs down. Nothing fancy — that was enough to get useful feedback!

But after readers selected one of those options, they were shown a survey where they could elaborate further. If you selected the thumbs-up emoji, you could talk a bit more about what you liked and wanted to see more of. If you selected the thumbs-down emoji, you were asked what you might suggest to improve the newsletter.

There’s no reason why you can’t direct readers toward a full survey after they answer the poll question. They’ve already engaged with your newsletter, and you’ve gotten the feedback you sought. But if you give them the chance to answer additional questions, they may decide to share even more with you. There’s very little harm in asking — anything else you learn from them is a bonus.

Tools you can use to deploy a poll

Many email platforms already have polling tools built in. AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and Substack offer the ability to customize your poll questions and track answers.

If you’re not on one of those platforms, you can use an outside tool, like CloseAlert, Feedletter, or YesInsights, to run polls. (HappyOrNot, the company that makes those in-person smiley face polls, also has its own polling tool that can be embedded into emails.) LiveClicker and Litmus Personalize offer more advanced polling tools, which can show live results within the inbox after someone clicks. (They also cost a fair bit more than some of the other options listed.) The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for instance, sometimes uses a live polling tool to showcase how other readers feel about topics like the Atlanta Braves baseball team — if you re-open your email a few minutes after you’ve voted, the results will change to reflect the latest polling numbers.

Or you could go a third route: You could DIY something by including a few different links within a newsletter and then manually track which options were clicked on the most. If you try a DIY poll, make sure each choice has its own unique link — otherwise, your email platform may not be able to tell you how many readers clicked on which link.

Do you have to choose between surveys and polls?

There’s no reason why you can’t use surveys and polls together as part of a larger strategy to engage with and learn from your audience. Maybe you’ll use polls in your newsletter to help improve your content strategy, with readers guiding you toward the types of stories or topics they want to see more of. But then, when it comes time to run the big survey, that’s where you’ll ask about reader demographics or for open-ended feedback. (I’ve got suggestions here for what to ask in a larger survey.)

Or maybe you’re using polls for quick feedback on a new newsletter design and then saving the meatier questions for the survey. That’s fine, too!

The most important thing is that you make space to engage with your audience and give them a variety of ways to engage with you. Whether you’re using polls to see how readers feel about a topic or how to improve your newsletter’s strategy, polls can be super powerful. Make sure you incorporate them into your newsletter to make it even better for your readers.

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