How to Add and Customize Polls in Your Newsletter

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 Emails 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.

A poll’s question, options, and correct answer are set once you save it — there’s currently no way to reopen a saved poll and change them. If you catch a mistake before sending, remove the Poll block from your draft and add a new one; once a newsletter has sent, its poll can’t be changed. Plan your wording carefully before saving.

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

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.

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

If you send through your own email provider rather than Letterhead’s sending, responder segments 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 responder segments were switched on for you are 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.

:::note Availability Creating a segment from poll responses may need to be enabled for your account, and support for providers other than Letterhead’s own sending is switched on separately. Ask your Letterhead contact if you don’t see it.

When this becomes available, you’ll be able to 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. That would make a poll the first step in a feedback loop: ask a question, then reach the readers whose answer you want to hear more from, using Create segment on the option you want, right from the edition’s poll metrics. Responder emails would resolve for newsletters sent through Letterhead’s own sending.

Editing and deleting

• Editing isn’t available yet. Once you save a poll, there’s currently no way to reopen it and change the question, options, or correct answer.
• 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.

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? Invite them to reply to your newsletter — replies are the simplest, friction-free way for readers to respond, and they also send a positive engagement signal to mailbox providers.

Where’s the old org-level Polls tab? Deprecated; the old URL shows a banner pointing to the channel composer.

For everything else, see Working in Emails.