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 — a poll lives in one channel and can be reused across newsletters in that channel only.
• 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, use the dropdown to select an existing poll from this channel, or type a title and press Enter to create a new one.
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 Poll Results on Response 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 Block Settings panel.

Once a poll is attached to a sent newsletter it is locked — question, options, and correct answer can no longer be edited. This is intentional: it keeps response data accurate, so plan your wording carefully.

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 Poll Results on Response 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.

:::note Availability Creating a segment from poll responses may need to be enabled for your account — ask your Letterhead contact if you don’t see it. Responder emails resolve for newsletters sent through Letterhead’s own sending. :::

Editing and deleting

• Edit a poll only before it’s attached to a sent newsletter.
• Delete removes the poll from the dropdown for future newsletters, but past response data stays intact on previous editions.

FAQs

Can I reuse a poll in multiple newsletters? Yes, within the same channel — but only once per edition. Need it in two channels? Create it in both.

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 Poll Results on Response 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.