Is Interactive Email the Future of Inboxes?

The interaction between your brand and its customer is the lifeblood of any business. Without setting up proper channels to bridge the gap between you and your audience, you may as well kiss your business goodbye.

Keeping an open line of communication is vital to the success of your online business. This reason is precisely why email marketing is one of the best channels for this purpose. Not only can you build better relationships with your current subscribers, but you can also convert them into loyal customers like you would by sending SMS using an API!

However, you need to keep up with the different email marketing trends so you can make the most out of your strategy. One of the more recent and interesting trends in this discipline is interactive email. It doubles down on the concept of what makes email great, thus helping you increase your engagement levels and conversion rate!

In this post, learn the value that interactive email brings to your business and concrete examples of interactive email at work to help you come up with ideas of your own for your business.

Why the need for interactive email

Email marketing is a very dynamic practice. With lots of innovation going around in this space, you need to be sharp, vigilant, and on your toes should you want to make the most out of your email campaigns.

The fact of the matter is that what works now in email marketing may not be as effective sooner than you think. Every company and brand is observing the latest practices on how to get more subscribers and increase their CTRs from their campaigns.

Therefore, the latest tactics and technology lose their novelty faster than you’d think because people are quick to adapt to them. If you’re not susceptible to change, then you might as well count yourself out from the game – email will always evolve to provide people with better ways to interact with your content.

Speaking of interaction, interactive email is somewhat of a game-changer in the strictest sense. This type of email has been around for years but not a lot of brands have implemented it as extensively. If there’s an innovation in email marketing that you need to capitalize on, then it’s got to be interactive email.

The key is “interaction”

If you’re not familiar with interactive email, then think of the usual emails that you receive from brands. There are good reasons why you subscribe and remain subscribed to their email lists such as persuasive copy, clear message, and others. However, wouldn’t it be nice if the email looks just as great as its content?

There’s nothing wrong with how brands design their emails, but there’s only so much you can do with it. What if there’s an image carousel or animated images like a GIF in the email? With a host of other potential elements you can add, you can create more
compelling emails that you can test and benchmark to help you engage and interact with your subscribers even more!

With interactive email, you don’t have to imagine. You can design your emails like you would a website. You can add menu hamburger menus, videos, and even payment gateways in your emails. And those are just some of the possible elements you can add!

Interactive email examples

Instead of telling you how to use interactive email for your business, it’s better to just show you! Below are examples of how companies used interactive email to great effect:

• Allen Edmonds – The brand used geo-targeting to provide subscribers with weather forecast through email. It also recommended products that users need to purchase according to the weather that day.
• The New York Times – To drive more subscribers to their publication, the brand created an email that makes use of an animated GIF as its heading. The headline reads, “Give the Truth. Give the Facts. Give the Times.”
• Pret – To promote its Smoothie and Frappe campaign, Pret launched an email campaign using animation as well. However, instead of GIF, the brand used CSS animated sprites to create the visuals of pouring a smoothie or frappe on a plastic cup every time the user clicks on the available flavors.
• TrendyMinds – The brand sent out an email promoting their latest content by way of a game. To unlock the content, subscribers must click on the colors in correct order.

Email marketing is always on the cusp of the future and interactive email is proof of that claim. With the technological advancements from companies like Campaign Monitor, the ability to create engaging and interactive messages is now upon us. There’s no need to send static, text-based email message now that you have a more compelling way to display your content to people via email.

It’s up to you to adapt with the times and include interactive emails in your strategy before it’s too late. Hopefully, the tips and examples above should have convinced you to take this route now.