Poor man’s email survey
If you don’t have time to set up an email survey, try this technique used by Spiegel and more recently Art.com. You can use your email click through stats to determine the results. Yes it’s open to abuse, and you only get one question, but it’s fun to involve your subscribers.
You can use the data to send more targeted emails, in this case I might receive a bunch of promotions for, “Safari Chic” after having voted for it.
{Subject line: Vote for Your Favorite Spring Look, Get 20% OFF!}
If we take a peak at the email in Dreamweaver, we can see they spliced up the four sections. Spiegel did not use image maps, which are not 100% reliable across all email clients. If you link each vote to a separate landing page, you can easily track results.
For instance a Safari Chic page:
They followed this up the following day with an email announcing the winner:
{Subject line: The Results are In! See the Winning Spring Look + 20% OFF!}
If you do want to take the time to create a survey, check out Survey Gizmo. I came across the site after I received this email from eROI which linked to a survey created by Gizmo. Being nosy, I signed up and found it easy to use. It lets you customize your surveys, adding in your logo and color scheme which is a nice touch.