Interactive Emails Drive Engagement – Period

Most marketing professionals know that interactive content and custom graphics have been on the rise over the past few years. This trend will continue in 2020.

Marketers are predicting that more emails will be opened on mobile devices than desktops and laptops combined! But what is interactive content, and how can you use it to strengthen your email marketing?

Interactive content is anything that a consumer clicks on, swipes, or interacts with in. In email marketing, interactive content can help increase open rates to over 70%. If you want to entice your subscribers, include interactive experiences such as video, memes, animated GIFs, or custom graphics within your email. One of the biggest interactive elements you can add to your campaign, and one of my favorites, is video. Of course video clips cannot be played within an email itself, but by using a nice call-to-action (CTA) graphic, perhaps a screenshot of the clip, or creating an animation based on some slides from your clip, you can entice the user to click and see more. This adds a bit of WOW factor to your content and encourages the end user to click. You can send the user to either your YouTube or your Vimeo page. An even better approach is to create a new blog or landing page on your website. The goal is to drive traffic and convert leads into paying customers, clients, subscribers, or donors.

Don’t forget to make your interactive emails responsive!

Even the most advanced email marketing experts are sometimes challenged with the task of combining responsiveness with interactivity. In the earlier days of email marketing, interactivity was designed as more of an entertainment factor for the recipient. Moving forward into 2020, it will be used in more functional ways, such as promoting engagement and preventing consumers from leaving the emails. Remember to always test your email campaigns on not only desktop but mobile and tablets as well. You may be surprised from all the time you spent on testing on your desktop to find that it renders very differently on your phone or mobile device.

What are some other interactive email marketing elements you can use?

• Videos that better present and explain your product
• Image carousels to display a few products items
• Survey forms and questionnaires
• Animated buttons and calls-to-action
• Image rollover effects to showcase product offering
• Interactive image and product carousels controlled by the user
• Accordion functionality helps to shorten the content in an email and also displays better on smaller viewing screens
• CSS-animated buttons to bolster your funnel marketing and drive customers to your ecommerce website

Gregory Soltesz – Noble House Media Group