How to Poll Your Subscribers in Jetpack

Here’s the situation: You have been posting regularly for a while and some of your readers have subscribed so they now get an email notification each time you post. It’s time to get feedback from your subscribers on what they like and don’t like. This is a case where you’d want to set up a poll listing possible topics so your readers can indicate which ones they really want.

It is actually very easy to do this – just follow these steps:

1. Create a new post, i.e., “Reader Poll”
2. Write a paragraph explaining the purpose of the poll.
3. Add a contact form.
4. Customize the form to add the desired poll questions in the most useful format. I find checkboxes to indicate topics of interest are most useful. Radio buttons are also quite useful (where you indicate an either/or choice). You may want a text field at the end where they can add topics they’d like to see.
5. Save this post. Since it is a post, your subscribers will automatically receive notification. When they click on the link, they go to the post on your site where they can actually fill out the poll.

There you have it! Your subscribers are all set to give you feedback. Each time one fills out the form, you will receive an email.

But wait! Isn’t a bunch of emails coming in at random times a pain in the butt to make sense of?

Not a problem! Just click on “Feedback” in the left column of your dashboard and you will see your readers’ answers. At the bottom of the screen under “Export feedback as CSV”, select “Reader Poll” as the feedback to download and click on the Download button.

You can then open up this CSV file in Excel and sort it to your heart’s content. Once you have the data in spreadsheet, you should find it very easy to interpret your results.