Get to Know Your Readers Through Polls This Month
Learn to craft engaging poll questions with step-by-step examples tailored to your audience — whether you're an established author, solopreneur or newsletter newcomer
This month, we’re focusing on a cornerstone of building newsletter momentum: knowing your readers.
Reader knowledge is an integral part of every successful newsletter, but how do you uncover meaningful insights about the people behind the email addresses?
One of my favorite ways is through polls and surveys.
Most newsletters can leverage built-in poll features to ask readers direct questions, whether it’s a quick one-off or a series of polls that build on one another. Surveys, on the other hand, are ideal for broader, more comprehensive data collection efforts (like my Substack Reader Behavior Survey).
Today, we’re focusing on the art of crafting powerful and insightful poll questions so you can learn something about your readers. You’ll learn:
How to think about your relationship with your readers so you can write questions that resonate.
A proven framework for customizing questions to make them fun, engaging and tailored to your readers.
Sample poll questions you can tweak and use this month.
At the end, I’ll also share examples tailored to where you are right now in your newsletter so you can get feedback on your poll question(s) in our community check-in next week and start learning about your readers this month.
Why Are Your Readers Here?
To ask effective poll questions, I like to examine the big picture and ask:
Why are your readers here?
This might feel like a rhetorical question (since most of us are asking poll questions because we don’t know why our readers are here!), but I know it’s a useful thought exercise nonetheless. It helps engage my empathy, my creative thinking muscles and helps me start thinking like a reader.
Knowing why our readers show up to read our work helps us craft poll questions that resonate with their lives, challenges and goals.
Here are a few starting questions you might ask yourself, based on the type of newsletter creator you are:
Established Writers / Published Authors
Are your readers here because they love your books or other published work (and hope to get more/special access to you)?
Do they aspire to write or be published themselves?
Are they hoping to feel more creative or inspired?
Entrepreneurs and Professionals New to Newsletters
Are readers here because they view you as an expert in solving a specific challenge?
Are they “curious lurkers,” eager to see what you’ll create next?
Creatives New to Everything (Newsletters, Writing or Online Publishing)
How do your readers’ personal, spiritual or professional pursuits intersect with the topics you write about?
Are they here to explore, learn or connect with a community?
Beneath every newsletter, there is a core motivating factor behind why most readers keep showing up. These foundational questions can help you start clarifying your purpose and start connecting it with your readers’ point of motivation. And if you don’t know the answer to any of those questions, that’s OK, too. Let’s explore how to write poll questions to start learning about them.
Some Guidelines For Writing Great Poll Questions
The best poll questions are engaging, specific and written with your readers’ interests in mind. Whether you’re gathering data about demographics, values or behaviors, I like to use these five guiding principles to write poll questions that inspire responses. They won’t come into play every single time, but they are a useful litmus test even when I decide to go outside the bounds and try something unique and interesting to get people’s attention.
1. Start with Your Readers’ Key Traits
Before crafting a poll question, think about your readers’ general demographic traits:
What’s their age group or life stage?
Are they professionals, creatives, parents or something else?
What unique challenges or goals might they have?
Example: If your readers are mostly parents, you might ask:
“What’s the first quiet moment in your day?"
When the kids are asleep.
Early morning before the chaos.
I’m still waiting for one!
Why it works: This connects directly to their reality, making them more likely to engage.
2. Layer in Relevance
Make your questions specific to the focus of your newsletter so they feel aligned with what you’re curating week over week.
Example: If you write a newsletter about creativity, try:
"When do you feel most inspired during the day?"
Morning, fresh coffee in hand.
Late at night, when the world is quiet.
Sporadically — creativity has its own rhythms!
Why it works: By tying the question to your newsletter theme, you reinforce why readers are there while gathering insights.