10 Tips to Make Your Email Interactive

There was a time when you sent an email and forgot about it because there was nothing more you could do about it. You never knew if the recipient received the email, opened it, read the contents, etc., unless you received a response.

Today, you have email interactive features that you can add to ensure that the recipient acts. You have the opportunity to adopt new methods that help you reach your subscribers in more innovative ways using interactive email marketing tactics. 

Interactive email examples show how email has evolved over the years, with marketers creating more engaging campaigns using interactive email design. Subscribers, too, never expected interactive email examples would throw the old rule book out to herald new interactive mail marketing techniques. 

Emails used to be static earlier, and the only engagement you could expect was the initial open. The call-to-action usually took the customer directly to the website (any specific page). In contrast, today’s interactive email lets you get highly creative and engage the customer to get active in the inbox itself. 

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Defining Interactive

Before delving into any email marketing campaign, you must first understand what the interactive element in it is about. 

Interactive email marketing includes an interactive element, which is nothing but the recipients’ ability (or accessibility) to click on the call-to-action present in the email inbox itself.

There are several ways to achieve this interactive element; by orchestrating content, including some more items in a shopping cart, participating in an online quiz, filling out a survey form (participating), participating in a poll, or playing an online game. Email interactive actions are classified as ‘interactive’ as the subscribers can actively participate by completing a task.

However, you should not confuse email interactive elements with other features in use today, like animated GIFs or even dynamic content like countdown timers. While they may engage the subscribers instantly, they evoke only passive reactions, with the subscribers doing nothing more than viewing them.

In the normal course of action, users never click or tap any button unless specifically prompted. It is a pretty different scenario with interactive emails – subscribers carry out a specific interactive task in the inbox.

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How Should an Interactive Email Appear?

Just as in an infographic or a video presentation, it is easier to convey by showing something graphic. Some excellent interactive email examples include British Airways, which simply added a countdown timer, which gave the fliers an idea of the time left for a sale to end. 

What’s more, the airline company also offered discounted prices on tickets that were booked within a specific timeframe. 

BBC is another excellent example of an engaging response interactive email. As soon as the users click on an animal image in the email, they can view more details.

Nike is probably one of the best interactive email examples worth following, especially if you plan to showcase new items. The sports goods company has mastered using dynamic, interchanging images to showcase several products quickly. You don’t have to stuff your email with many images, which can only confuse your target audience.

With its interactive email examples, Amazon establishes that feedback is what makes a company improve the quality of its products and ensure a great delivery experience. Amazon uses the easiest and most effective email interactive tactics by asking its customers to give a review through star ratings.

10 Tips on Making Your Email More Interactive

Here are some helpful tips for making your emails more interactive and engaging.

1. Generous use of buttons

It is easier to make your email interactive by adding buttons, as such an act has always been part of email etiquette. However, ensure that the task involves a specific action occurring within the email itself and does not lead the subscriber outside the message. It is easy to incorporate CTAs to initiate actions within the emails themselves.

You can put such clickable buttons to many uses in your email interactive campaign efforts. They are similar to the uses such buttons serve on a website, like displaying content. You can add a hover state to your button, which initiates in-message action.

It all depends on what you want to accomplish, like changing the color of the text, underlining it, or creating a drop-shadow effect. You can also create a fading effect on hover, easily adding to your templates. The fading effect controls the opacity of the text, tables, or images.

Similarly, it is easy to swap background images using hover quickly. The best part is you can combine the fading effect and the swap at one go, making it even more exciting for the subscribers. 

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2. Using countdown timers

Countdown timers can be used in your email interactive initiatives to convey urgency, prompting people to take action instantly. Static timers can be set for specific dates and times, e.g., “our big Friday sale starts at 9:00 AM,” and can be added to your messages. However, a live countdown makes it more exciting and tells your customers exactly how much time is left for the sale to commence. 

A good example of countdown timers used in email interactive campaigns is a product that gives a live account of how much time people have left to buy a product/service before the prices start increasing. It is a great way to remind people to take action immediately lest they want to miss this deal. 

Nifty Images is an engaging email interactive approach for handling timers as it creates an animated GIF, and URL, which work with most email providers. It may not be suitable for Outlook as it shows only the first frame of any animated GIF, and you’ll have to cram in all the messages in the first frame itself. 

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3. Using image carousels

Image carousels are favorites with brands and are used on websites and social media. Particularly eCommerce brands love using carousels simply because they can easily display several offerings with different views. The same type of carousels can effectively be used in your email interactive marketing campaigns. 

Adidas is probably one of the best interactive email examples where image carousels are used to showcase its entire range of products and the range of its current sales. What’s more, both are captured in the same interactive email design. 

A majority of email providers and email marketing platforms support image carousels. You can test image carousels in your email interactive campaigns on your users’ various email platforms and notice that they get displayed excellently. 

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4. Games

Games are fun with all age groups, and marketers can take advantage of this as people like distractions to keep them off drudgery. Anything with an element of surprise creates a sense of expectation, bewitches people, and elevates their mood, especially if they come out winners.

Including games in your email interactive marketing campaigns is not very challenging, and it is easier to do it with emails than it is to do on your website. Interactive emails with games create an exciting experience and help increase engagement. 

One of the best interactive email examples is Minesweeper, which was popular on computers several years ago. Today, it is back with a bang and is successfully used in interactive emails. It has all the elements of the game-play included in the email message. 

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5. Navigation

Interactive navigation is a popular term associated with websites, and great importance is attached to enabling easy navigation from page to page to reduce the bounce rate. However, most marketers don’t realize that they can incorporate customer experiences features in interactive email campaigns. 

Smashbox created an interactive email using what is known as a “hamburger” menu, popular on websites until now. It has used the trick of adding interactive navigation elements into its interactive emails, which helped the company keep its messages crisp. However, audiences could still delve into their areas of interest without hiccups.

6. Ratings and polls

Feedback makes a brand improve itself, be it the product quality or delivery mechanism. It is of great value to businesses today, and one of the best ways to get instant feedback is via interactive ratings and polls. It is easy to measure the value of a specific product from a customer’s point of view and the customer service experience.

The example of interactive email below shows how ratings and polls work in an interactive email campaign. The campaign covers feedback in the inbox, which is automatically sent to the product page. Businesses can explore several possibilities for feedback emails like embedding Google Form in the message or using tools like Typeform. 

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7. Using real-time information

You don’t have to use static information in your emails; you can make it more exciting by making it dynamic and more personalized. It is easy to deliver real-time data through interactive emails, including the current availability of products or the day’s weather forecast for a particular region. 

A leading bookseller used real-time information in an interactive email to present a short (12-second) video of five book titles (front cover) via an API. It is easy to connect the data source to an email platform to create targeted messages with real-time information.

8. Scrolling

With more people using smartphones today, they are used to smaller screens. However, each time they read a brand email, they have to scroll endlessly. The good news is that they are never tired of scrolling, which presents an opportunity to add a bit of creativity to make scrolling an engaging and exciting game. It also ensures that your email recipients read your email right up to the bottom. 

Penguin Random House’s interactive email campaign is one of the best interactive email examples that is as beautiful as it is simple. By using clever formatting, they made email scrolling a pleasurable journey, prompting readers to scroll the email to the end. 

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9. Social feeds

Although emails have nothing much to do with social media, it is easy to introduce social media posts in emails. Integrating static emails with fresh and frequently updated social feeds is one of the best interactive email approaches that generates impressive results for marketers.

Body Shop’s Mother’s Day email is probably one of the best interactive email examples incorporating Instagram and Twitter posts, with the Hashtag #GotitFromHer that soon went viral. The brand capitalized on the opportunity Mother’s Day offered and used it successfully in its interactive email campaign.

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10. In-email shopping

Imagine using email to sell your products instead of going through a tedious process like building an ecommerce website. Email marketing presents a fabulous opportunity for brands to indulge in in-mail shopping campaigns. It helps reduce friction and enhances sales by enticing email recipients to shop directly from their inboxes. 

A great example of interactive email used for in-email shopping campaigns is that of JackThreads, where interactive email was used more like an ecommerce website checkout page and enabled email recipients to shop right from their inbox itself.

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Key Takeaways

• Creating an interactive email campaign is far easier than building a website and optimizing it to make it visible.
• With interactive email design being easy to master, marketers must take advantage of the cost efficacy and reach that interactive email can provide.
• There are multiple ways to take advantage of interactive email marketing, but it is essential to pick that closely matches your brand and marketing efforts.

Conclusion

The tips listed above should make it easy for your email interactive and to fulfill your marketing needs without a website. All it takes is a bit of creativity and patience to reach your target audience and have them complete the action in their inboxes.

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