# In-email polls

Ask your readers one question from inside the email, and see how they answered on the campaign's report.

A poll is one question with two to five answers, each answer a button in the email. A recipient
taps the button that matches, lands on a short thank-you page, and their answer shows up on the
campaign's report as a distribution: how many chose each answer. It is the quick way to ask
"was this useful?", "which of these should we write about next?" or "how likely are you to
recommend us?" without sending anyone to a form.

## Adding a poll

In the [email builder](https://sendbeam.io/docs/campaigns/email-builder), add the **Poll**
block. Its settings hold the **Question** and the **Answers**, one per
line — at least two, at most five. Blank lines are ignored, and a sixth line is not rendered.
Under Style you can set the question's size and colour, the buttons' colour and corner radius,
and the block's alignment, the same way as a Button block.

A poll can sit in a campaign or in a template. The answers are tied to the campaign the email was
sent from, so a template with a poll in it gives every campaign made from it its own results.
That is also the catch: an automation sends without a campaign, so a poll in an automation's
email collects answers nobody can see yet — see [Limits](#limits).

> Keep the answers short — they are buttons, and five long labels wrap awkwardly on a phone.
> "Yes", "No" and "Not sure" read better than sentences.
> 

## What a recipient sees

The question as a line of text, then the answers as buttons. Tapping one opens a page in their
browser that says thanks and nothing else — it does not know who they are or what they were
asked, and it does not need to: the click itself is the answer. There is nothing to submit and
no form to fill in.

Every link in a sent email is tracked per recipient, and a poll button is a link like any other.
So a poll answer counts as a click in the campaign's **Clicked** figure and its click
rate, and a recipient who answers is shown as Clicked in the recipients table.

## Reading the answers

Open the campaign. Once it has opens or clicks, a **Poll answers** panel appears
above the recipients table, one section per poll in the email, with each answer's share and count
and the number of people who answered. The same data is in
`GET /api/v1/campaigns/{id}/report` under `polls` — one entry per poll
block, with the question, the labels and a count per option. Poll answers are not listed under
`links` there; they are reported as answers instead.

## How answers are counted

- **One answer per recipient.** Someone who taps two buttons is counted once, for
  the answer they chose last — a second click is a changed mind, not a second vote.
- **Machines are left out.** Link scanners and mail-client prefetchers follow every
  link in an email, including all five buttons; those clicks are recognised and excluded, so a
  scanner never answers your poll.
- **Only email counts.** The poll also appears in the campaign's
  [web version](https://sendbeam.io/docs/campaigns/merge-tags), but a click there has no recipient to be
  attributed to and is not counted.
- **Per campaign.** Answers belong to the campaign whose email carried the button.
  Duplicating a campaign starts a fresh count.

## Limits

One question per block, two to five answers; add a second Poll block for a second question. A poll
cannot yet tag the contact with their answer or start an automation — the results are read on the
report and through the API. If you need to act on an individual's answer, a
[hosted form](https://sendbeam.io/docs/forms) linked from a Button block does that today.

Answers are reported for campaigns only. A template with a poll in it can be chosen for an
automation's email step, and the email goes out with the buttons in it, but there is no campaign
for those answers to belong to, so they are not shown anywhere yet. The step's settings say so
when the template you pick has a poll; until that changes, keep polls in campaigns.

In a content A/B test, keep the poll's question and answers the same in every version. A poll
block keeps its identity when a version is copied, so its answers are reported together, under
the wording in version A. To ask something different in one version, delete the block there
and add a new Poll block in its place.

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Source: https://sendbeam.io/docs/campaigns/polls