Once installed, Mail In Vote allows you to use email marketing to get direct feedback from people by sending messages with ballots in the body. You can also get back some very good and detailed statistics from the responses that come back.
Setup is very easy for Mail In Vote. There are two pieces to the installation, one component and one plugin. Once you have both pieces installed, you are presented with a small welcome window that walks you through the simple steps of preparing the extension for sending out ballots.
Once you have entered your email address and name, you can then work on creating your first ballot. You're first presented with a Ballot Subject box, and after you enter your Subject and save it, the rest of the form is displayed.
In addition to the Subject, the entire form consists of sections to configure Content, Recipients, Responses and Results. The interesting thing is that each Choice you give to your ballot becomes a unique link that can be tracked in many different ways.
When you've finished entering your Choices, you can quickly send a test email to make sure all is working properly, and then send your email ballot off to either everyone in your list of users, or just a specific group. As people start to respond, you can view their selections in several different types of charts available from the back end of your website.
Mail In Vote is a good extension to use for quick information gathering, and it puts a nice spin on the old web poll. It's available from Code Haiku at $29 for a six month subscription.
