AI Summary
Your WordPress site sends a lot of emails. Order confirmations, welcome messages, form notifications, membership updates, maybe even a weekly newsletter. But you probably have no idea whether the people receiving those emails actually find them useful.
Open rates tell you the subject line worked and click-through rates tell you the link placement was decent. But neither one tells you what the reader thought of the email itself.
A feedback poll fixes that. You add three clickable options to the bottom of your email (something like: didn’t like it, it’s ok, loved it), each one links to a form on your site, and the reader’s vote is recorded. It takes them about five seconds.
I do this with our weekly newsletter, and the responses are always worth reading. Some people just take a second to say they enjoyed it, which is a nice thing to find in your inbox on a Monday morning. Others explain why something didn’t work for them, and those are probably the most useful ones (even if they sting a little) because they help me do better next time.
Every now and then, someone mentions a topic they’d like to learn more about, which is basically free content research handed to you on a plate. Last week, a reader said the poll itself was pretty cool and asked how it worked. So here’s the tutorial.
In this post, I’ll show you how to build a feedback poll using WPForms, connect it to Google Sheets so your whole team can see the responses, and create the links you’ll add to your emails. You can add the final poll to any email you send, including the ones your WordPress site sends.
- How an Email Feedback Poll Works
- Why Add a Feedback Poll to Your Emails?
- Where You Can Use an Email Feedback Poll
- What You Need to Add a Poll to Your WordPress Emails
- Step 1: Create the Feedback Form in WPForms
- Step 2: Connect the Form to Google Sheets
- Step 3: Set Up the Landing Page
- Step 4: Add the Poll Links to Your Email
- Step 5: Track Results and Take Action
- Tips for Getting More Email Poll Responses
- The Poll Only Works if the Email Arrives
How an Email Feedback Poll Works
The concept is straightforward. You add clickable options (like emoji or text links) to the bottom of your email.
Each option is a link to the same page on your WordPress site, but with a different URL parameter.
When the reader clicks one, they land on a page with a form. Their vote, email address, and the email title are all passed through the URL into hidden fields, so the reader doesn’t need to fill any of that in. All they see is an optional comment box and a submit button.
The response is saved to WPForms entries and optionally synced to a Google Sheet where your team can access it.
Adding a poll with WPForms like this needs no JavaScript, no embedded forms, and no special email client support. It works in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and any other email client. If your email recipients can see links in their emails, they’ll be able to vote in your poll too.
Why Add a Feedback Poll to Your Emails?
Most email metrics are indirect. Open rate tells you the subject line worked. Click-through rate tells you the link placement was good. Neither one tells you whether the reader actually got value from the email itself. A feedback poll asks that question directly.
And because it only takes one click, you’ll get far more responses than you would from a full survey. We’re not asking people to fill out a questionnaire – a quick tap of the mouse is sufficient.
There’s a deliverability benefit too. That tap counts as a click, which means inbox providers like Gmail treat it as a positive engagement signal. If your subscribers are actively clicking links in your emails, that’s good news for your sender reputation.
But the biggest payoff is the pattern you see over time. When you collect this data consistently over weeks or months, you start to see which types of emails your audience actually wants to receive and which ones fall flat. I’ve changed the direction of entire email series based on what the poll data told me.
Where You Can Use an Email Feedback Poll
This works with any email that goes out from your WordPress site. Here are a few examples to show what I mean.
Newsletters sent from WordPress. If you use a plugin like MailPoet or The Newsletter Plugin to send email updates directly from WordPress, you can add poll links to every issue. Over time, you’ll see which topics and formats your subscribers prefer. (If you’re not sure which newsletter plugin to use, we have a full roundup of the best WordPress newsletter plugins.)
WooCommerce order emails. Add a poll to your order confirmation or shipping notification emails. Customers can tell you whether the email had the information they needed, and you get a direct feedback channel without sending a separate follow-up.
Membership and course updates. If you run a membership site or online course, the emails that go out after someone completes a lesson or renews a subscription are perfect candidates. You’re catching people at a moment when they’re already engaged with your content.
Onboarding and welcome sequences. First impressions matter. A poll at the bottom of a welcome email tells you whether your onboarding flow is actually helpful or just going through the motions.
Form confirmation emails. After someone submits a support request or applies through a form on your site, the confirmation email can include a quick satisfaction check.
The common thread here is that these are all emails WordPress sends automatically. You set up the poll links once, and every email that goes out includes them. (If you want to learn more about setting up automated emails, check out our guide on how to send automated email in WordPress.)
What You Need to Add a Poll to Your WordPress Emails
Before we start, here’s a quick rundown of what you’ll need for this setup:
WPForms Pro. You’ll need a Pro license or higher to access the Google Sheets addon. WPForms is what we’ll use to build the feedback form and collect responses.
A WordPress page. This is where the form will live. When someone clicks a poll option in your email, they’ll land on this page with their vote already selected.
WP Mail SMTP. You’ll want to make sure all the emails leaving your site (including any confirmation messages from the poll form) actually reach the inbox. WP Mail SMTP handles that. If you’re on the Pro plan, you’ll also be able to track clicks on the poll links through the email log.
Step 1: Create the Feedback Form in WPForms
Start by going to WPForms » Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Give the form a name like “Email Feedback Poll” and start with a blank form.
The form needs four fields, but only one of them will be visible to the reader. The rest are hidden fields that get filled in automatically through the URL.
The form needs four fields, but only one of them will be visible to the reader. The other three capture data from the URL silently.
Add three Single Line Text fields and label them:
- Vote
- Email title
For each of these fields, you need to do two things. First, click the field and go to the Advanced tab in the Field Options panel. In the Default Value box, click Show Smart Tags and select Query String Variable. This inserts a {query_var key=””} smart tag. Between the quotes, add a key name that you’ll use in your URLs:
- For Vote, set the default value to {query_var key=”newsletter-vote”}
- For Email, set it to {query_var key=”email”}
- For Email title, set it to {query_var key=”utm_content”}
Second, set each of these three fields to Hidden so they don’t appear on the page. You can do this by clicking the field visibility toggle in the Field Options panel (the eye icon). The fields will still capture data from the URL, but the reader won’t see them.
Using utm_content as the key for the email title is a nice shortcut if you’re already adding UTM parameters to your email links for campaign tracking. The same parameter does double duty: it tracks the campaign in your analytics and identifies which email the feedback is about.
Now add one visible field: a Paragraph Text field. Set the label to something like “Want to tell us more? (optional)” and make sure the field is not marked as required. Most people will just submit their vote and move on, and that’s fine. The comment box is there for the ones who have something specific to say.
The result is a very clean form. The reader lands on the page, sees a short comment box and a submit button, and that’s it. Their vote, email address, and which email they’re rating have already been captured in the background.
Collecting the email address is more useful than you might think. If someone leaves a comment saying they’re struggling with something specific, you can follow up with them directly. And occasionally someone will use the comment box to say they want to stop receiving your emails. You’ll have an unsubscribe link in every email already (as you should), but some people find the poll more noticeable and use that instead. Having their email address in the same row means you can handle it quickly.
The email title field is useful for the same reason. If you send multiple types of emails (newsletters, product updates, order confirmations), you’ll want to know which one the feedback is about. Without it, you’re looking at a spreadsheet full of votes with no idea what email triggered each one.
Remember to save the form before you exit the builder.
Step 2: Connect the Form to Google Sheets
This step is what makes the data useful beyond just you. When poll responses go straight to a Google Sheet, anyone on your team can open the spreadsheet, filter by date, sort by response type, and build simple charts without needing a WordPress login.
Go to WPForms » Settings » Integrations and find the Google Sheets section. You’ll need to install the Google Sheets Addon if you haven’t already.
Sign in with the Google account where you want the data to live.
Once connected, go back to your feedback form in the form builder. Navigate to Settings » Google Sheets and click Add New Connection. Give the connection a name (something like “Email Poll Responses”).
You can either create a new spreadsheet or select an existing one. Map your form fields to columns:
- The Rating hidden field maps to a “Rating” column
- The Email hidden field maps to an “Email” column
- The Email Title hidden field maps to an “Email Title” column
- The Paragraph Text field (comment) maps to a “Comment” column
- Add a Custom Value using the Entry Date smart tag so each row has a timestamp
Save the form. From this point on, every submission will appear as a new row in your Google Sheet automatically.
A few ideas for what you can do with that data: share the sheet with your content team so everyone can see feedback trends. Use Google Sheets’ built-in chart tools to visualize the split between positive, neutral, and negative over time. Filter by date range to compare how different email campaigns performed. If you have a regular newsletter, you can even track whether sentiment shifts week to week.
Step 3: Set Up the Landing Page
Create a new page in WordPress. Give it a clean, simple title like “Email Feedback” and a slug like /email-feedback/.
Add the WPForms block (or use the shortcode) to embed your feedback form on the page. Keep the page minimal. You can also use the WPForms Form Pages Addon to instantly create a distraction-free landing page for your form.
Go back to the form builder and check your Confirmation settings. Set the confirmation type to Message and write something short:
Thanks for the feedback! We use this to make our emails better.
That’s all you need. If you want to go a step further, you could set up conditional confirmations based on the hidden Rating field value. Show a different message when someone voted “Didn’t like it” (maybe something like “Sorry to hear that. Your comment helps us improve.”) and another when they picked “Loved it!” But that’s optional.
Step 4: Add the Poll Links to Your Email
Each poll option in your email is just a regular link to your feedback page with URL parameters that fill in the hidden fields. The parameter names need to match the query string keys you set up in Step 1.
Here’s how the three links should be structured:
https://yoursite.com/email-feedback/?newsletter-vote=I+loved+it&[email protected]&utm_content=email+name
https://yoursite.com/email-feedback/?newsletter-vote=It's+ok&[email protected]&utm_content=email+name
https://yoursite.com/email-feedback/?newsletter-vote=Didn't+like+it&[email protected]&utm_content=email+name
The only part that changes between the three links is the newsletter-vote value. The email and email title stay the same across all three.
For transactional emails (WooCommerce notifications, membership updates, form confirmations), you’ll typically be editing the email template to add these links. Most WordPress email templates support basic HTML, so you can add the poll as linked text or emoji near the bottom of the email:
How was this email?
👎 Didn’t like it
👌 It’s ok
❤️ Loved it!
If you’re customizing WooCommerce emails, you can use WooCommerce’s built-in email customizer or an email template plugin to add the poll links to your templates. For other transactional emails, you’ll add the HTML directly to the template file.
If you also use this with newsletters sent through a marketing platform, most tools have merge tags that can insert the subscriber’s email address dynamically instead of hardcoding it. But for WordPress transactional emails, you’ll typically know the recipient’s email already through your template’s available variables.
Test the links before you send. Open each one in your browser and submit a test entry. You won’t see the hidden field values on the page, but check that the vote, email, and email title all come through correctly in your WPForms entries or Google Sheet. If they’re not populating, make sure the query string keys in your URL match the keys you set in the {query_var} smart tags exactly.
Step 5: Track Results and Take Action
You’ve now got two places to check your poll data.
Google Sheets makes it easy to share your poll data with multiple people without needing to give them access to your WordPress dashboard. The spreadsheet updates in real time as responses come in. You can sort by the Vote column to group all the “Loved it!” responses together, filter by date to compare different email sends, or use a simple formula to calculate the percentage breakdown for any time period.
If you want a quick visual, highlight the Vote column and insert a chart. A pie chart or bar chart will show you the sentiment split at a glance. Share the sheet with anyone who needs to see it.
WPForms entries in your WordPress dashboard give you the same data in a different format. This is useful if you want to read individual comments or see the full detail of each submission. Go to WPForms » Entries and select your feedback form.
WP Mail SMTP click tracking adds another layer. If you’re running WP Mail SMTP Pro, you can see how many people clicked the poll links in each email through the email log. This tells you not just what people voted, but how many people engaged with the poll compared to how many received the email. A low poll click rate might mean the poll isn’t visible enough in the email layout, while a high “Didn’t like it” rate on a specific email tells you something about the content.
The most valuable thing you can do with this data is look for patterns. If you send a weekly newsletter and “Loved it!” spikes whenever you include a practical tutorial, that’s a clear signal to do more of those. If a product announcement email consistently gets lukewarm ratings, maybe the format needs rethinking. The data makes these conversations concrete instead of speculative.
Because you’re collecting email addresses, you can also act on individual responses. If someone leaves a comment saying they’re confused about a feature or need help with something, you can reach out to them directly.
That kind of follow-up tends to surprise people (in a good way) and it’s a simple way to build trust. You’ll also occasionally get someone who uses the comment box to ask to be unsubscribed. It happens, even when there’s an unsubscribe link right there in the email. The poll is just more visible. Having their email in the same row means you can handle it quickly.
Tips for Getting More Email Poll Responses
Keep it to one question. The whole point of an in-email poll is that it takes almost no effort. If you add a second question, you’ve turned it into a survey, and response rates will drop.
Put the poll at the bottom of the email. Place it after your main content, right before the footer. The reader has just finished your email and this is a natural moment to ask what they thought.
Make the options visually obvious. Emoji help a lot here. A row of three faces with labels underneath is instantly understandable. If your brand style doesn’t use emoji, simple text buttons work too, but make sure there’s enough visual separation between the options.
Don’t overthink the wording. “Didn’t like it / It’s ok / Loved it!” is simple and covers the range. You’re measuring general sentiment, not running a research study. Three options is the sweet spot.
Use it consistently. A single poll result from one email doesn’t tell you much. The value comes from collecting data over time so you can spot trends and compare.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need WPForms Pro for this?
The hidden fields and query string variable smart tags work in all versions of WPForms, so you could technically build the form itself with WPForms Lite. But you’ll need a Pro license or higher for the Google Sheets addon, which is what makes the reporting and team access side of this practical. If you don’t need Google Sheets, you can view entries in the WordPress dashboard with any version.
Will this work with emails sent from external services like Mailchimp or ConvertKit?
Yes. The poll links are just URLs, so they work in any email regardless of how it’s sent. The form and landing page live on your WordPress site, and that’s where responses get collected.
Will this work with any email sent from WordPress?
Absolutely. Any WordPress email where you can customize the content, whether that’s a WooCommerce notification, a membership email, a form confirmation, or a newsletter, can include these links.
Can I see results without Google Sheets?
Yes. WPForms stores all entries in your WordPress database, and you can view them under WPForms » Entries. Google Sheets just makes it easier to share with your team and do quick analysis without logging into WordPress.
Can I customize the options?
Of course. You can change the labels, add more options, or use a different scale entirely. Just remember that more choices means more friction. Three options hits the right balance between useful data and ease of use.
Can I add a feedback poll to WooCommerce emails?
Yes. WooCommerce emails are built from template files, and you can add the poll links to any of them. You’ll either edit the template directly or use a WooCommerce email customizer plugin. The poll links work the same way regardless of the email type.
Is this different from a survey?
A survey typically has multiple questions and takes a few minutes to complete. A feedback poll is a single question with a single click. The response rate for a poll like this is much higher because you’re asking almost nothing of the reader. If you want to go deeper, you can always follow up with a full survey later, but the poll gives you a baseline of feedback with very little effort from either side.
The Poll Only Works if the Email Arrives
There’s an obvious prerequisite to all of this: the emails need to reach the inbox in the first place. If your WordPress transactional emails are landing in spam or not sending at all, nobody’s going to see your poll.
WP Mail SMTP fixes that by routing your emails through a properly authenticated SMTP provider instead of relying on your host’s default PHP mail setup. It’s worth configuring before you start adding poll links to your emails, because there’s no point collecting feedback on emails people never received.
If you’re on the Pro plan, you also get click tracking in the email log, which pairs nicely with this setup. You can see how many people clicked a poll link compared to how many received the email, giving you a response rate alongside the actual feedback.
Next, Improve Your WordPress Emails
If you’re putting this much thought into what your emails say, it’s worth making sure they look the part too. WordPress sends some pretty plain-looking emails by default, and a well-designed template can make a real difference to how people engage with your content. We’ve tested the best options in our roundup of WordPress email template plugins.
Ready to fix your emails? Get started today with the best WordPress SMTP plugin. If you don’t have the time to fix your emails, you can get full White Glove Setup assistance as an extra purchase, and there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee for all paid plans.
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