How to Embed a Google Form Poll into an Email | Tutorial

Creating a survey to send out to hundreds or thousands of email addresses may sound like a daunting task. The main questions are, “Will people be bothered to fill it out?” and “How do I embed a poll into an email?” Luckily, Google Forms addresses both of these questions.

With Google Forms, it’s easy to create an interactive survey that recipients can fill out directly in their email clients. In this article we’ll show you how to create a poll in Google Forms and embed it into an email, ready to send out to the world.

Create a Google Form Poll/Survey

To get started, you’ll need to create your survey, with all its questions and answers.

Go to your Google Drive account in your browser, and at the top-left click “New -> More -> Google Forms -> Blank form.”

You’ll immediately be presented with a basic template for creating a poll. Fill in all the parts necessary, noting that you can change certain options by clicking the downward arrow next to the “Question” line (like whether you want it to be “multiple choice” or let readers give longer answers).

Using the paint palette icon you can change the colour theme of your survey from that rather imposing purple colour and add your own header image. To keep with our topic we went for a tasteful mix of several shades of white.

There’s also a slider near the bottom that lets you choose whether recipients can skip the question or if it’s “Required.” Over on the right you can add images, videos and sections (more questions) to the survey, and the three-dotted menu icon at the top-right lets you add collaborators.

Embed Google Form Poll into Email

Once your survey is ready, click “Send” at the top-right to bring up sending options. You’ll see that you can send the form via email, via a link or by posting it to social networks. This time we’ll be sending it by email, so click the envelope icon, and under “Email” enter all the addresses you want to send it to.

Crucial things to note here are the “Collect email addresses” box at the top and the “Include form in email” box.

If you tick “Collect email addresses,” the recipients will be required to give their email addresses before filling out the form. You may want this data of course, but this may put a lot of people off from actually filling out the form, so be wary of that.

The “Include form in email” box is a useful one because this is what actually embeds the form into the email rather than getting recipients to click through to the survey (which they may also be reluctant to do). We recommend ticking this box.

While a few years ago many email clients may not have supported Google Forms surveys, these days they’re very compatible. As you can see below, we received the embedded survey in Outlook without issue.

When you’re ready, click “Send.” You’ll be able to monitor responses to your form under the “Responses” heading on the poll’s main page (saved in your Google Drive, of course).

Conclusion

While Google Forms isn’t one of Google Drive’s features most in the foreground, it’s there for those who need it and functions very well.

Remember that using this method you can just as easily post your survey to various social networks or even embed it to a web page using the HTML option in “Send form.”