Adding polls and surveys

Polls let you engage readers and gather feedback directly from your newsletters. This guide covers creating, customizing, and tracking them.

What changed

Polls used to live at the organization level under a separate Polls tab and could be reused across all newsletters in an organization. That’s no longer how polls work. Polls are now created directly in the composer and scoped to individual channels. The old org-level Polls page shows a banner pointing you to the channel’s composer; polls created under the old system keep their metrics at their original URLs.

Before you start

• Polls are channel-scoped — each Poll block creates a new poll tied to one channel. There’s currently no way to attach an already-existing channel poll to a different block.
• A poll can appear at most once per newsletter edition to keep results clean.
• Polls can’t be added to company-level templates; a poll block in a company template creates a new poll only when the template is applied to a channel newsletter.

Create a poll

1. Open or create a draft from your channel’s All Campaigns list — polls are created inside the composer.
2. Drag the Poll block from the block library into your layout.
3. In Block Settings, click Create poll to open the poll-builder form.
4. Choose a poll type:
   • Vote — a simple one-question poll; readers pick one option and see a confirmation message.
   • Quiz — a poll with a single correct answer; with Show Results on Confirmation Page enabled, readers learn whether they were right.
   • Rating — a rating poll, in one of two scales: star ratings or a 0–10 scale (commonly used for NPS).
5. Fill in the required fields — title, question, response options, confirmation message, and (for Quiz) the correct answer. Missing required fields block the save.
6. Style it: Button Color, Text Color, and Alignment (Left, Center, Right, or Full Width) control how the poll buttons render.
7. Save from the poll-builder form.

Preview before sending to confirm the poll renders well on desktop and mobile.

Edit a poll

While a newsletter or company template is still a draft, you can reopen a poll and change it:

1. Click the Poll block in your draft.
2. In Block Settings, click Edit poll to reopen the poll-builder form.
3. Fix a typo, rewrite the question, reorder or replace options, or adjust styling.
4. Save.

Editing stays available until you publish the newsletter or template. Once a newsletter has sent, its poll can’t be changed.

Where readers vote and what they see next

A poll in the inbox is a set of tapable options. Most email clients don’t allow a live, interactive form to run inside the email itself, so when a reader picks an option they open a response page hosted by Letterhead, and their answer is recorded there. This is why results aren’t shown live inside the email — the interaction happens on the response page, one tap away.

You control what that page says and does:

• Confirmation message — a rich-text “thank you” that readers see after voting. Because it’s a formatted field, you can add links: point readers to a related article, a longer survey, a signup, or back to your site. Quizzes support separate messages for correct and incorrect answers.
• Show Results on Confirmation Page — when enabled, readers see the current tally after they vote (a percentage breakdown per option). Leave it off to keep results private to your team.

Design the response page

You can make the response page look like the rest of your brand: its logo, fonts, layout and colors, plus a default thank-you message.

1. In your workspace sidebar, open Resources → Signup Pages.
2. Find the Poll Results Page card for that newsletter and choose Edit.
3. Change any of the settings below. The preview updates as you go; switch it between With results and Message only to see both versions of the page.
4. Click Save. Readers see your design from the next poll they answer.

The design applies to the response page for every poll in that newsletter. Until you change a setting, it keeps the page’s original look. Reset to default puts every setting back; nothing changes for readers until you save.

Logo

• Channel logo shows your newsletter’s logo, the one set in your brand settings. If the newsletter has no logo, readers see a checkmark instead.
• Custom image lets you upload a different image for this page only, such as a campaign logo. Use a JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP up to 5 MB, and add alt text so screen readers can describe it. Your newsletter’s logo stays the same everywhere else. Choose Remove to go back to it.
• Logo Size sets how large the logo appears: Small, Medium or Large. Medium is the original size. If an uploaded image is too small to look sharp at the size you chose, the editor tells you.

Animated GIFs appear as a still image on the page.

Typography

Pick a Heading Font for the poll question and a Body Font for everything else: the message, the answer options and the percentages. Default keeps the page’s original font.

Layout

Alignment places the logo and the message on the Left, Center or Right. The results list always stays left-aligned so the percentages are easy to read.

Colors

Set the Page Background, Card Background, Heading Text and Body Text, and a Results Accent for the reader’s own answer: its bar, checkmark and “Your answer” label. If a text color would be hard to read on the card background, the editor warns you, but you can still save it.

Confirmation Message

A short default message, up to 280 characters, that readers see when a poll has no confirmation message of its own. A poll’s own message always comes first, and a quiz’s correct and incorrect messages come before both. Notices about the vote itself, such as a reader who has already answered, keep their standard wording.

Viewing poll metrics

Poll metrics live on each newsletter edition’s metrics page. After a send, open the newsletter’s metrics to see total responses, the breakdown per option, and the response rate (responses ÷ recipients × 100). Results are live — the counts update as responses come in. Metrics can take up to an hour after send to appear, and you can export poll data from the metrics page.

Because each poll option is a tracked link, a reader who votes is also counted as a click in your engagement and click metrics — so running a poll tends to lift your click numbers.

The legacy aggregate view across all letters is no longer the primary way to look at poll performance — each edition’s metrics page is the source of truth.

Follow up with people who responded

You can turn the people who chose a particular answer into an audience segment, then send just to them — a follow-up survey, an offer, or a thank-you. This makes a poll the first step in a feedback loop: ask a question, then reach the readers whose answer you want to hear more from. On the edition’s poll metrics, use Create segment on the option you want.

Polls sent through your own email provider

:::note Availability Responder segments for newsletters sent through an email provider other than Letterhead’s own sending aren’t switched on for any account yet, and neither is the Mailchimp matching described below. Your Letterhead contact can tell you where it’s up to. Segments from polls sent through Letterhead’s own sending are available to everyone. :::

Once it’s switched on for you, responder segments for polls sent through your own email provider work the same way. Whichever provider carried the newsletter — Mailchimp, Iterable, SendGrid, Sailthru, Braze, Pardot, HubSpot, or Cordial — the readers who chose an answer land in the segment.

Constant Contact is the one exception, and it doesn’t fail quietly. Constant Contact doesn’t tell Letterhead which individual reader clicked, so there’s no way to know who chose which answer. If you try to build a segment from a poll that only went out through Constant Contact, Letterhead says so when you create the segment instead of handing you an empty one. A poll that also went out through another provider still works — you’ll get the readers it could identify.

Mailchimp answers from before this was switched on

For Mailchimp, votes cast before this was switched on for you will be matched up too, so an older poll isn’t a dead end. Matching happens as part of the routine sync of your Mailchimp audience, so give it until the next sync rather than expecting older answers immediately.

One limit worth knowing: an older answer can only be matched to someone still in your Mailchimp audience. If a reader voted and was later deleted or archived from the list, their answer stays uncounted in the segment. It’s never matched to the wrong person — they’re simply left out.

Deleting

There’s no dedicated delete action for a poll. While a newsletter is still a draft, you can remove the Poll block from your layout to drop that poll from the draft. Once a newsletter has sent, its poll and response data stay as part of that edition.

Collect feedback with a reply-email survey

For open-ended feedback, or a quick reaction without a poll, link a few emojis to a pre-filled reply email. A reader clicks one, their email app opens with your address, subject and answer already filled in, and they send it with whatever they want to add. Clicks and replies both count as positive engagement, which helps your sending reputation.

1. Add a Heading block with your question, such as “How’d we do today?”
2. Below it, in a Paragraph block, type a few emojis with a space between each: bad, meh and good, thumbs up and down, or a 1 to 5 score.
3. Highlight each emoji and link it to a mailto: address, changing the body to match that option:

mailto:[email protected]?subject=Feedback&body=👍

Replace [email protected] with the address that should get the replies, Feedback with the subject line, and 👍 with the answer for that emoji. Emojis, UTF-8 hex codes and plain text all work in the body.

Send yourself a test and click each link to check it opens a reply with everything filled in. Put the survey in a template to collect feedback on every edition.

FAQs

Can I reuse a poll in multiple newsletters? Not from the composer today — each Poll block you add creates a brand-new poll, and there’s no way to select an existing channel poll to attach instead. If you want the same question in another newsletter, create it again.

Are results shown live inside the email? No. Readers vote on a Letterhead-hosted response page, and results appear there (if you’ve enabled Show Results on Confirmation Page) and on the edition’s metrics page. The counts themselves are live — they’re never a fixed snapshot.

Does voting count as a click? Yes. Each poll option is a tracked link, so a reader who votes registers as a click in your engagement and click metrics.

Can I choose how results are displayed — a pie chart, bar graph, or different styles? Results are shown as a percentage breakdown per option. There isn’t a chart-style picker (for example pie vs. bar) at this time.

Can I pull a poll’s results into a later newsletter automatically? Not automatically. Read the results on the edition’s metrics page (or export them), then present them in your next edition however you like.

Can I use other formats — emoji/smiley scales, image “this or that”, or a slider? The available poll types are Vote, Quiz, and Rating (star ratings or a 0–10 scale). Other display styles aren’t available yet.

Can I build a multi-step survey? A poll is a single question. For a deeper journey, link out from the confirmation message to a full survey.

How can readers give open-ended feedback? Use a reply-email survey, or link out from the poll’s confirmation message to a form of your own.