How do you make email clients accept polls?

How often do you click on a quick poll when you’re browsing a website? Chances are you won’t do it a lot, but sometimes you just can’t resist clicking to share your opinion. And it’s even cooler when you can immediately check what everybody else thinks and see how your contribution influences the results. It’s a clever tactic you can set up for your own company. Want to know if visitors have heard about your latest product? Or how often they use your brand? Put up a simple poll and find out.

It’s an enormous opportunity for us email marketers. We have a large contact database that we can email directly. We have tools to drive click-through and learn more from our subscribers. All we have to do is use a cunning trick to make our polls work in most email clients

Here’s a 4-step guide on how to do it:

1. Create your poll in plain text format
2. Place an image that looks like a radio button before or after each answer
3. Link each image to your landing page where that specific answer is prefilled
4. Have your readers click “submit” and show them the results. Done.

Another way is to measure the click-through on your poll via your ESP’s reporting. That will allow you to analyze the total number of clicks on the links in your poll in comparison with the number of clicks on a certain link in that poll. It’s as easy as that.

Conclusion: Most email clients don’t support polls. But by using a simple trick, you’ll be gathering valuable information through your newsletter.