Updated: May 1, 2025

How to use beehiiv polls

Available on paid beehiiv plans. Click here to upgrade your account.

Our powerful polls feature allows you to create polls in your publications to your heart’s content. You can choose between a Voting option that allows your subscribers to vote on topics directly from your email, or a Trivia option where you can offer anything from fun quizzes to a one-click trivia competition to keep your subscribers more engaged and entertained.

We’ll start by introducing some quick tips to get you started with helpful links to other articles. Then, we’ll provide a video tutorial on how to create beehiiv polls as well as written instructions. Finally, we’ll show you the different options that you have for poll response styles, how to add polls to your publication after creating them, and where to view the data you collected from your polls.

Quick tips to get you started

Polls are not the same as Surveys. Polls are a short and concise question that your subscribers vote on or answer as trivia. Surveys are longer and allow you to collect more info about your subscribers.

Poll result data can be exported and downloaded as a CSV file.

You can add a poll to your welcome email.

One of the countless ways that you can customize automations for your audience is to add a webhookstep to notify another app of an event in beehiiv. One popular use case is to add a webhook when a subscriber gives a poll response.

You can create segments based on poll results.
Poll results, including comments left by your subscribers, are available in your post analytics.

Watch and Learn: Polls and surveys

Disclaimer: The beehiiv platform has evolved since the filming of this video, so parts of the user interface featured in the video will be slightly different than what you see in your account. In particular, you would access Polls from the Audience option found in the left hand panel of your account, and not from the top navigation menu.

How to create a subscriber poll

From the left panel dashboard, go to Audience > Polls.
Click New Poll.
The New Poll creation menu will appear on the right.

You’ll need to add the following:

Name: Give the poll a name, this will not be visible to your subscribers.
Description: Enter in a description of the poll, this will not be visible to your subscribers.
Poll Type: Select the type of poll, Voting or Trivia.
- Voting: This type of poll allows subscribers to select an option of their preference and then tallies the responses.
- Trivia: This type of poll allows subscribers to select answers to questions and then shows subscribers their result.
Poll Style: Choose the poll design that you prefer: Default, Bullet points, Numbered list, Unstyled, or Inline. (See below for examples of each).
Redirect URL: Enter a URL to redirect your subscriber to after responding to your poll.
Collect additional feedback: Toggle this option on to collect more information before redirecting your subscriber at the end of your poll.

Poll Options: Create the specifics of your poll. Enter your poll question, a description, and each poll response, hitting enter to add another response.

Note: The poll description mentioned in step 3 is not visible to your subscribers, but the descriptions for the poll options (in this step) will be.
If you are using a Trivia Poll, you’ll also need to determine the correct answer(s) to your question(s).
Show Results: You can choose to enable the live results to your subscribers or not, by toggling the option left or right.

For Voting Polls, this will show the percentage of responses for each option.
For Trivia Polls, this will show whether their answer is correct or not.
- If you enable the live results for a Trivia Poll, when your subscribers select an answer in their email, they’ll be redirected to the results page where the correct answer is revealed, along with the aggregate results from other subscribers.

Preview: Always be sure to preview how your poll will look before publishing.
When you are happy with the look of your poll, click Save to finalize it. Remember, polls cannot be edited once they have been created, and your poll will not be live until you publish it.

How to style your polls

Poll styling is based on the template used for your newsletter post. Any changes you make in the Style tab on the Compose page — such as font, size, or color — will automatically apply to polls in that post.

Here’s how different parts of a poll inherit styling:

Poll titles use the Heading 3 (H3) formatting.
Poll subtitles (if added) follow your body text formatting.
Poll options (clickable responses) use the link formatting.
Lists within polls (if used) follow your list formatting.

This setup allows you to fully customize your poll’s appearance to match your newsletter style.

Poll response style options

You can modify the style of your poll responses (step 3 above). Here are your options:

Default

Bullet Points

Numbered List

Unstyled

Inline

How to add polls to your publications

Once you’ve created one or more polls, you can access them anytime directly from the post editor by clicking / to bring up the options, then click on Poll under the Premium options.
You’ll see the names of your polls to choose from, or you can select Create new poll to start a new one.

Where to view data from your polls

There are a few ways for you to view the results of your polls. After a post that features a poll has been published, you’ll find data from the results aggregated on the Polls tab within the post itself.

Additionally, you can view the results and data analytics from all of your polls directly from the Polls dashboard in your account.

You can also find individual subscriber’s poll results in their subscriber dashboard.