You can put polls on your site for fun, but it's perfectly possible and very useful to use polls for both gentle and serious marketing to help increase your traffic and your profits.
Information
Information is the life blood of marketing and you can use polls to collect vital details about the sort of people who visit as well as the more formal information about their thoughts on a product.
You can ask a straightforward question. For example, if you sell marmalade, you can ask: "What sort of Marmalade do you like?", and list various flavours. The answers will tell you the types liked and their order and this sort of information is useful, particularly if you have just introduced or will introduce a new product.
But as well as this, it tells you something equally useful. It tells you how likely your visitors are to respond to your polls since you can compare the number who answered as a percentage of the number who visited. If there is a wide discrepancy then you may need to look at the sort of polls you publish and be aware that you might not be getting good information back.
As a general rule, people like polls, seeing them as harmless ornamentation and entertainment. They also like to interact and feel part of the site and having an easy outlet for their preferences and ideas is useful in building sites that retain and encourage visitors. Again, if you don't get the results you expect, you may need to rethink the wording you use.
Of course, you can also ask questions that elicit other, more pertinent, information that is of use in planning your marketing and this area needs careful thought. Whatever you do, don't dash off a quick poll when a few minutes thought could have resulted in something that generates more relevant information.
It really is as easy as thinking what you would like to know and then producing a poll that is both interesting and fun to do and, thus, will be well supported.
Real Marketing
There are as many ways to use polls in real marketing as there are products. For example, if you sell t-shirts with a racing car motif you can use a Formula 1 or a Rally poll. It's a popular subject so visitors will probably be knowledgeable and enjoy putting their opinions and you will ensure that your t-shirt image and details are presented nearby, ready to receive the clicks.
In the same way, if you are marketing a new product or service you can use a poll to put the idea into the heads of visitors without making it too obvious what you are doing. If you have a new line in CDs, for instance, you might prepare a poll about the life of a singer to prompt buying of a new track or book.
There are many possibilities for using polls in this way that simply prompt people to think particular thoughts or think about a particular type of product. This can be very powerful since, for the most part, people will be unaware of the suggestion that is happening.
Polls like this take little preparation or implementation, they can be changed frequently and act as colourful additions to websites. The only problem is in integrating a poll policy into your marketing structure and then thinking what questions to ask and what answers to suggest.
However, I believe that, with thought, polls can act as clever marketing tools for the astute website owner who knows how to exploit and use them.
