No more static newsletters and simple email blasts. Email marketing has changed, and now, brands are playing in the realm of interactive emails, the type of emails that let recipients interact with the email beyond reading it in real time and often, from the comfort of their inboxes. These types of emails aren’t just visually appealing; they exist with the purposeful design to alter how an audience responds to and responds differently to brands. Here’s how an interactive email changes the marketing playing field and why every email campaign needs one.
Why Static Emails No Longer Cut It
For years, marketing professionals have enjoyed the ease of the standard email template text boxes, images, and a single call to action. Yet with changing consumer behavior over the years, a resurgence of normalcy suggests that people have gotten used to so much more, living in a digital world that is more integrated. Static, nonresponsive templates are ineffective for audiences who scroll through social media and apps that provide live, updated, ever-changing information. In addition, with the growth of daily competition to attract consumer attention (i.e., more and more people getting more and more emails daily), a different approach relies upon it. Things must change. Interactive emails change a once-static webpage into a dynamic entity.
What Makes an Email Interactive?
Interactive email consists of components users can click, tap, or swipe without ever leaving the email crafted. These components can be image carousels to view products, collapsible tabs to explore within, in-email surveys, in-email quizzes, in-email forms, static buttons, animated buttons, countdown timers, and even compromised in-email shopping experiences where users can choose options. Enhance your email deliverability rate by offering interactive experiences that keep users engaged and reduce the need for redirects. Interactive emails allow users to accomplish their needs without having to link out to a webpage, which static email does but only halfway until they are redirected.
The biggest advantage is reducing steps. When a subscriber can choose their favorite via a poll or leave a review, and it’s easier to do so in the email versus elsewhere, they’ll do it! Carousels and buttons create less friction for participation. Instead of having to click and be brought to a new link sometimes lagging in response subscribers can do it all right there in the email created by the brand.
This streamlined journey for consumers minimizes friction and time while simultaneously enhancing the success of the campaign. Absent a caveat, brands see increases in CTR, time in email, and conversions in email. But the most important factor is that these make the email like an app or microsite instead of an email. It’s more engaging, more useful, more memorable. As inboxes become more crowded with competing brands, interactivity allows marketers to rise above the noise and create potent, memorable experiences.
Boosting Engagement with Embedded Interactions
Increased engagement is one of the major advantages of interactive emails. When subscribers can interact with content within an email whether it be voting in a poll, rating a product, or flipping through a mini image gallery they are devoting more time to the brand’s message. Additionally, this type of engagement is similar to that of personalization, and it’s a true win for the brand. Therefore, all email statistics improve more opens, more clicks, more conversions.
Improving Conversion Rates Through In-Email Actions
Where traditional email marketing has long provided marketers with the opportunity to insert a single call-to-action (CTA) that prompts users to travel to an outside page or website to accomplish what the marketer desires, it also comes with built-in friction. The more users have to load another page, fill out another form, get through a tedious process step by step, the more opportunities they have to get sidetracked, go off the beaten path, or abandon their original intention altogether. The more travel distance needed between email and engagement, the less likely the end user will remain active.
The purpose of interactive emails is to eliminate that friction since it allows users to do everything they need to do right there within the email. Instead of requiring an external landing page, an email is all that’s needed to select a variant for a product purchase, schedule a demo time and date, or fill out a feedback-based survey. When users can engage without leaving their inbox, it makes their lives more efficient, and such a process speaks to millennial and Gen Z mindsets.
For example, a fashion retailer can embed a style quiz right in an email that instantly recommends outfits based on a subscriber’s responses never needing to exit the email. A wellness company can let subscribers schedule a class via an embedded calendar. Even B2B brands can include embedded interactive forms to gauge leads’ preferences or to RSVP to events. The options are endless, and they reduce clicks to conversion while keeping the user in place, not distracted from leaving the email.
Moreover, there are measurable benefits with this new hassle-free interactivity. Brands typically see higher CTRs, improved conversions, and increased engagement. But fundamentally, it improves the experience for the customer, allowing them to stay in one place with a navigational hub that acts as an interactive placeholder instead of merely a conduit to get to another destination. In a quest to break through email clutter, this kind of shrewd interactivity makes your message stand out and enables results quicker.
Creating Personalized, Dynamic Experiences
Interactive emails make it easier to give customized experiences on a large scale as well. When a user interacts with these features whether they answer a question about product interest or select what content appeals the most they provide brands with first-party data on the spot. This inspires improved segmentation and personalized drip campaigns. Ultimately, this responsiveness urges marketers to change their communications for the future and provide content that makes more sense, increasing customer satisfaction and ultimately customer LTV.
Making Data Collection Less Intrusive
Surveys and forms via interactive emails are one of the simplest ways to receive valuable feedback from your users without interrupting the experience. For example, where, in the past, marketers wanted to collect feedback, they would send a link in the email directing people to a third-party survey site or special dedicated landing page. While this was effective, it created friction, as users had to leave their email, open up a new link, wait for the new page to load, and then respond to several questions before their opinion was registered. In a distracted world, it’s no wonder this resulted in drop-off and lower response rates.
However, with interactive email design, this all changes. When surveys and forms are embedded in the email, people can respond with a mere click or two without redirecting themselves. An NPS survey can ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” or a thumbs up/thumbs down can accompany a blog post response. The operation becomes a micro-interaction instead. This low-friction approach helps people respond to items better, especially when effective visuals demonstrate what’s needed.
This is a strategy that works across many use cases. For instance, you can include an in-email form asking people how they feel about shopping with you or whether they liked a purchase after they’ve made one. You can send an email with interactivity asking people if they like a new feature or campaign you’ve launched that’s directed to subscribers. You can more effectively create a segmented list by sending out an interactive email asking people to pick their preference for content from topics, frequency of emails, product categories so every email can double as real-time, effective data collection. Each email can serve the dual purpose of being a useful email and a way to collect time-sensitive information.
The benefit of the approach is that it doesn’t feel like work. People are far more likely to respond to one or two questions nestled within your email while they’re already there reading it versus you forcing them to go somewhere else to participate in a survey even if that requires just one tap or click to respond. You get the information you need from them on the spot and your marketing team gets valuable, usable information without all the stress and energy expenditure that comes with receiving replies weeks later from traditional survey campaign efforts.
On a more practical level, some of what is learned through forms and surveys found in emails can determine content creation, product offerings, and even customer service replies. When customers understand that you care to listen and make adjustments based on feedback, they will be more inclined to stay with and work with your brand in the future.
As creators struggle for digital real estate, establishing what may appear to be an effortless approach for people just to respond to your brand is all that’s necessary. Forms and surveys embedded within the email transform every correspondence into a dialogue rather than a monologue, fostering a relationship from brand to consumer. Ultimately, it becomes an effective sounding board in the present for more effective marketing and communications efforts in the future.
Reinforcing Brand Identity Through Visual Design
The opportunity for interactivity in email fosters a means of artistic expression. Instead of still images and text, one can add motion graphics, hovers, and micro-animations to enhance the story and render the brand experience more kinetic. Every click, hover, and scroll, as well as the stopping of scrolling, helps to support brand tone and voice and universal aesthetic. For the oversaturated consumer receiving similar branded communications via email, these subtle design happenings support memory and reliability for stability across every marketing avenue visual identity is the same no matter where one sees it.
Technical Considerations and Compatibility
Yet there are technically challenged considerations to keep in mind, regardless of the benefits. Not all interactive components are universally supported within email clients. Therefore, a marketer must cross-reference them with other email services to ensure functionality. Often, this means that if a recipient opens an email from an unsupported client, they’ll see a fallback version or a bare-bones approach. But with careful attention and progressive enhancement strategies, brands can offer a compelling experience to the majority while still being mindful of those who may have accessibility issues.
The Future of Email Is Interactive
As consumers’ expectations consistently rise, brands will have to provide increasingly improved, faster, and deeper experiences. Interactive emails are the next step in brand messaging and engagement with a targeted consumer base. Taking a previously static approach and making it a dynamic opportunity allows brands to gain more engagement, deeper personalization, and more conversions.
Thus, by hopping on the interactivity bandwagon now, brands will not only stand out in the inbox but be ahead of the curve for potential interactivity down the road. If you have a product launch, a call for feedback, or just want to say thank you, interactive email gives your reader an opportunity to respond and come back.