How to add a poll or survey question to your MailChimp emails.

Interested in watching the video of this demo, click here!

Let’s get started.

Let’s create a campaign and add in poll and survey questions.

Click create a campaign. Just a simple email and name it “poll questions”, then click the begin button. In the To field choose your audience. You can segment out if you want. I won’t personalize it and click Save. In the Subject line since this is just a demo, I’ll type in poll. Click Save.

All right, onto the design.

For the template, I selected the story layout. Since this is a demo, it doesn’t really matter what I add for content but I do want to delete all the unnecessary bits as we usually do in our little demos. For the headline, I’ll add “Hey, please take this poll question”. To add the actual poll or survey you select from the dropdown “Open Cheat Sheet“. On the page that opens, look for Polls and Surveys.

Add the Poll Merge Tag

I copy the merge tag and paste it into the text field in the email. Now, the first thing you see is the X. The X value in the merge tag determines the orientation of the poll in your campaign. So it can be either H for horizontal or V for vertical.

You can add in as many merge tags in a single campaign, as you want. Just be sure to close each poll rating beginning with an end poll. I would hesitate to do that because what happens when a person fills this out, is they go to a special poll page that you set up in your audience settings. If they want to fill out the next question. They have to go back to the email and fill out the next question and so on and so forth. You might just want to keep it to one question either a poll or a survey in your campaign emails.

So we’re going to put an H here for a poll, and then we’re going to ask our question. And our question is – how likely are you to recommend Mailchimp?

Okay, now we’ll just save and close and we’ll take a preview of that.

You notice that the default poll structure is 1 through 10. I haven’t come across a way to change that at all. So when you think of your poll question make sure you’re thinking about numbers 1 through 10 on a rating scale.

Add the Survey Merge Tag

We’ll go back into the email and we’ll add in our survey merge tag. The survey merge tag is to ask your subscribers a single question with a set number of responses they can choose from. It’s just a survey followed by your answers to your surveys.

Let’s say the survey question is, do you love Mailchimp? For the answers to choose from I add no, yes, and maybe.

At this point, we have one question for a poll and one question for the survey. When the email is designed to your liking, click on save and close. To review the email click on the Preview button. Keep in mind that when they answer either the poll or the question, it will take them to a special survey/polling landing page. So let’s go take a look at that next.

Special Landing Page

Click continue for now and we’re going to go over to our audience, click on manage audience, click on settings.

Under settings, go to the sign-up form, click on the form builder. Under forms and response emails, we find our survey landing page. This is what people will see when they answer either your poll or survey question.

For now, we’re going to keep it as default but you can design it the way you want. You can add in, use an image, you can edit but we’ll just keep it the way it is. And then we’re going to send out our email and see how this all works.

Send the Email Campaign

I think we’re ready to send. So I’m going to click send to our four recipients.

So here’s our test email, click on it, open it up, and here are our questions. How likely you to recommend Mailchimp? Now, if I click on 10 or any of these numbers we will be taken to that special survey landing page. I go back to the email, and on the survey question on do you love Mailchimp? No, yes, maybe. We’ll say yes. We’ll go back to that same survey landing page. Keep that in mind, you can design survey landing page the way you want.

Check Your Stats

To check out your stats for your poll or surveys that you send in your campaign emails. Go to the Reports tab and then click on the view report for the campaign that you just sent for your polls and survey, and then go to the analytics 360 tab where you can view the poll and the survey results.

In our demo results, one person said yes, a hundred percent percentage. And the votes cast was the number of how many people actually clicked on a rating, pending votes are how many people are left to vote from the email sent. And the last vote cast was at a particular time and date of the last person who actually clicked on the rating.

So there you go guys, that’s a nice way to get some interactions, some dynamic involvement from your subscribers, get them voting on these polls and surveys.

Have any questions? Post them in the comments below.

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