Make your emails more engaging with polls and surveys - Online Help | Zoho Campaigns
Hello Marketers!
Welcome back to Marketer's Space. This week, we're looking at two features that can turn a one-way email blast into an actual conversation: polls and surveys.
Why to use polls and surveys?
Most emails go out and you hear nothing back. You check opens and clicks, but those numbers tell you what people did, not what they thought about. Polls and surveys can fill that gap by letting your contacts share their opinions directly inside the campaign they receive.
Any kind of business can benefit from this such as a SaaS company asking users to rate a new feature, a retailer gauging interest before a product launch, a publisher finding out what topics their readers want next. The best time to send them is when you have a specific question that matters to your next move, not just when you want engagement for its own sake. Post-purchase follow-ups, product feedback windows, and end-of-quarter check-ins are all natural candidates for including a poll or creating a specific survey-based campaign.
A use-case
Say you handle email marketing for Zylker Pulse, a SaaS company that builds project management tools. After shipping a redesigned dashboard, you want to know how subscribers actually feel about it, but sending a separate email just to ask feels like too much friction. So you drop a reaction-based poll into the campaign announcement itself. Within 48 hours, you have a clear picture such as whether most readers liked the new layout, a handful were unsure about it, and a small group found it confusing. That feedback shapes the onboarding copy for the next release, without a single support ticket or user interview.
Polls in Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns lets you add a poll directly inside your email template using the Create Poll component in the drag-and-drop editor. There are three poll types to choose from.
Create a Poll component and the three types of polls you can include in your email campaignsA response-based poll works like a numbered scale. You set a range (say, 1 to 5), define what the low end and high end mean (for instance, Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree), and then assign a written response to each rating band. It is good for nuanced opinion questions where a number alone doesn't tell the full story.
A rating-based poll asks your contacts to rate something on a scale you define. You set the number of ratings, choose whether they appear as numbers or bullets, and label each answer. It's well-suited for product feedback, event satisfaction scores, or anything where you want a measurable, comparable response.
A reaction-based poll lets contacts respond using emojis. You pick which reactions to include, label each one, and Zoho Campaigns displays them as a clickable row in the email. It's lightweight, visually engaging, and works well for when things need to be informal like checking-in on your contacts' reaction or brand sentiment questions. Note that a reaction poll supports a maximum of five emoji options, so choose the ones that cover your range without overwhelming the reader.
Note: You can only add one poll per campaign, so please choose the poll type that best matches what you're trying to find out.Surveys via Zoho Survey
Surveys can go a step further. While a poll is a single embedded question, a survey can contain multiple questions, branching logic, and a full results dashboard. Zoho Campaigns integrates with SurveyMonkey and Zoho Survey. Here's how the Zoho Survey flow works, since it's tightly built into the platform.
First, ensure that you've integrated Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Survey. Next, build your survey inside Zoho Survey. Once it's ready, head to the Publish tab and create a Collector. Under the Private audience options, choose Email Invites by Zoho Services, then select Zoho Campaigns. This step is what makes your survey available for selection when you create a campaign. Without it, the survey won't appear in the campaign setup dropdown.
Back in Zoho Campaigns, create a new campaign and choose the Zoho Survey category. Your published survey will appear in the Surveys dropdown field on the Basic Info page. From here, the setup follows the same steps as any email campaign: pick a template, configure your recipients, and send.
Use the Publish tab to create a Collector in Zoho Survey; create a Zoho Survey campaign and choose the published surveyThere's also a shortcut worth knowing. In Zoho Survey's Publish tab, under Survey Distribution Options, you'll see a Go to Zoho Campaigns link. Clicking it takes you directly into Zoho Campaigns with that survey already pre-selected in the campaign creation flow, so you can skip the manual lookup entirely.
When you choose a pre-defined, survey-based template inside Zoho Campaigns while using the Zoho Survey category, the call-to-action (CTA) button automatically carries the merge tag $[ZS:SURVEYURL]$. This tag dynamically inserts the survey link at send time. You can also inspect it manually by clicking that CTA on the template to open the Button Properties if you want to confirm it's in place or add it to a custom button.
Worth adding to your next campaign
Polls and surveys don't need to be a separate campaign; they work best when they're already part of something you were going to send. Drop a poll into your next product update, or follow up a campaign with a Zoho Survey link when you need richer feedback. Either way, you'll come away knowing something you didn't before.
Until next time, happy marketing!
Sincerely,
Sai Prashanth
User Education
Zoho Campaigns