How to Create Poll in WhatsApp for a Win-Win Decision-Making

WhatsApp polls, your tool for making informative and data-driven decisions.

Are you looking for a simple way to know your friends’ opinions about a topic or gather insights before launching services?

Or perhaps you may want to know what a majority of your users may choose from the different options available.

It is possible without spending any money on WhatsApp Polls. It’s a popular feature that lets you ask questions and get real-time answers from members.

Let’s understand more.

What is WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is hands down one of the most popular messenger apps for smartphones, actively used by over a billion people around the globe. You need to download the app, get an internet connection to send and receive messages, audio, images, and videos.

Unlike SMS texting, WhatsApp is fast, easy, and more convenient in terms of user experience. Besides, there are no charges for using WhatsApp because it uses the internet. So if you’re looking for a platform to send messages privately to friends, group chat and share live locations, WhatsApp is the perfect💯choice!

It is freely available for download on the Google Play Store, and you can also use it on a Mac or Windows computer. Thus, you aren’t bound to using a phone and nor are your customers, making this a very versatile and easily accessible tool!

What are WhatsApp Polls?

WhatsApp Polls allow you to run a voting poll in your group. You can ask questions with up to 12 options to choose from. Users can select one or more options in real time or get notified whenever somebody chooses an option.

Creating WhatsApp polls is an easy process and can be used to ask anything. Businesses can use polls to gather insights about certain products or services by collecting the voice of the customer. From these results, businesses can understand what can be improved after analyzing the poll results.

Before we jump to the process of creating WhatsApp polls, let’s overview some advantages of using polls.

Benefits of WhatsApp Polls

So, to poll or not to poll? Well, before you start, here’s a quick take on the benefits:

• Group decision-making: Polls provide a democratic approach to decision-making. It ensures everyone’s opinion is considered before concluding.
• Quick and Easy: Creating polls on WhatsApp is much easier than on other platforms. You might even face issues in integrating the third-party polls with your preferred applications.
• Boost Engagement: If you’re already a member of a group that’s been inactive for a long time, you’ll notice a notable engagement from the members after running a poll. This creates a fun environment in your group chats.
• Marketing Purposes: Businesses especially marketers, can use polls to conduct market research and gather data to understand their audience better.
• Planning events: You can use polls to gauge participant interest, preferences, and availability when organizing events. It helps in streamlining the planning process. 
• Feedback: Polls are a good and quick tool to collect feedback from your existing customers rather than asking them to fill out lengthy forms.
• Survey: When launching a new product or a service, WhatsApp Polls can be used to gather past experiences and improve new offerings.
• Privacy: WhatsApp Polls are private to group members, so you’re ensuring the opinions and data collected are controlled within your audience.

Thus, WhatsApp isn’t just a messenger app to connect with family and friends. It has now become a business tool for marketing and communication, where businesses can easily reach customers. In fact, WhatsApp CRMs too are on the rise to facilitate better customer relationships.

How to Create a Poll in WhatsApp?

Creating a poll is easy in WhatsApp.

Here are the steps to create a poll:

• Open a chat.

• Tap on the paper clip 🖇️icon on the text box and look for Poll > Create Poll.

• Enter your question in the Question field.
• Enter all your poll options under the Options list. You can change the order of your poll options by tapping and holding the hamburger icon.

• By default users can select multiple answers. In case, you want to allow users to select a single option, turn off the Allow multiple answers toggle.

• The last step is tap the send icon at the bottom to create your poll.

And that’s it, you’re done!

Viewing Poll Results

Once you have created and sent the poll in your chat, you can track their responses and check the vote candidates. 

To view the results of the poll, tap the View Votes link at the bottom of your poll. Here you will find the summary of voters and their responses.

WhatsApp also allows you to review past poll results and check how people responded. You can easily delete🗑️a poll if you would rather not keep a poll active anymore.

Analyze WhatsApp Poll Data

Just viewing the votes will give you instant answers to your question. But if you’re running several polls in a sequential order, you need to analyze the results.

Analyzing the WhatsApp poll responses helps you draw meaningful insights and make data-backed business decisions.

Here’s an easy guide to analyzing your WhatsApp poll data.

• Collect Data: Collect the poll responses. To find specific polls, open WhatsApp and go to the search icon. Select Polls and here you can see the poll responses received.
• Organizing Data: Compile all the answers from respective options in an organized format like Excel or a Google sheet.
• Calculate Responses: You can start by counting the total number of responses received and calculate the percentage for each option. This will help you conclude popular options.
• Identify Patterns: Are there any similar patterns that you find? Are you getting a higher engagement on polls with fewer options or vice versa? Are there any specific questions that trigger more poll answers? These questions will help you identify some common trends.
• Compare objectives: After analyzing the data in sheets, start comparing your results with the initial objectives. Are the results matching your preferred options or do you find surprising results?
• Conclusions: By now, you might have a clearer understanding of the poll results. Use these insights to make informed business decisions and check if they align with your business plans and lined-up strategies.
• Conduct Follow-up Polls: Based on your findings, decide if you want to narrow down answers even further. Ask questions with answers closer to popular suggestions and common sentiments.

Whether you use WhatsApp polls for personal or professional purposes, analyzing WhatsApp poll data can provide valuable insights that can inform your decision-making process.

Best Practices for Creating Effective WhatsApp Polls

Using polls to get answers to questions and make decisions is a great way to gather information, but it’s best to follow some best practices to maximize their effectiveness.

• Direct questions: Ask questions that have direct answers, without any explanation needed. Making questions tricky will reduce the number of responses on your group chat polls.
• Clear options: Try to limit the length of your option answers. Just like questions, keep the answers short, simple to understand, and direct. Keeping the answer options to the point will help group members eliminate any thoughts on explaining the answers.
• Limit options: Although WhatsApp provides 12 options, you don’t necessarily use all of them. Too many options make it difficult for users to select one and create more confusion. You can try limiting the options to 4 or 5 for higher engagement and better analysis.
• Don’t overload polls: Restrict the temptation to run polls once in a while. Overloading the contacts with polls might be irritating and they might stop answering your polls.

While it is good to get to know customer experience and options, too much of a good thing can cause a drop in response rates, so be sure to be selective on those questions!

FAQs about WhatsApp Polls

Summary

Now, you know almost everything about WhatsApp polls and how to use them in your chats and groups.

Polls are an effective tool for decision-making and engaging with group members. It’s worth mentioning that the effectiveness of WhatsApp polls depends on how they’re used and the end purpose for which they are employed.

Don’t consider polls only for engagement purposes, use them wisely for gathering feedback and making better business decisions.

Next up, life is all about alternatives, so why not explore the best secure WhatsApp chat alternatives?