The email marketing space is getting more competitive with each passing day. The email marketing is going dead debate is already a closed chapter, and several businesses are looking forward to improving their email marketing game. An average person receives 121 emails daily.
Cutting through the clutter requires companies to come up with something unique and exciting. Well, interactive elements can help redefine your customer experience and reader journey as it brings your messages closer to the experience of other platforms with a much higher ROI of $44 for every dollar invested and no competition to bother.
As an email marketer, I have been viewing a lot of innovative concepts from top brands, and there is so much that everybody could implement in their email marketing campaigns.
Today I am bringing up 6 of the best ways to fuse interactivity in your email messages to woo your customers almost instantly. If you are looking for a simple but highly effective means of using interactive elements in your email, you are in the right spot. Dive in deeper to know more about the topic.
Use Psychological Behavioral Traits Like FOMO To Complement Interactive Elements
Using real-time interactive elements is a great way to boost your email messages’ engagement rates and CTR rates.
Delta experimented with an interactive email that helped them share real-time data regarding the availability of seats. This email allowed the customers to upgrade their seating options or book another place without logging into their website.
They combined the user experience with convenience to make purchases easy for customers.
Interweave Survey Responses With Emotions And Intent
For surveys and reviews, you can combine two or more interactive elements within your email template.
You can include a scratch card for passing on the promised gifts in case you were looking for information in exchange for giveaways. It is widespread for marketers to use Google forms for surveys, and they simply use emails as a platform for sending out the link to the form.
However, you can use the email itself to embed a questionnaire. You can include a provision for displaying the result of the current trends once the user has submitted their opinion.
Add Fun Even If It Doesn’t Drive Sales First-Hand.
Sometimes, sending out messages purely to drive engagement helps boost your click-through rates for general communication pieces. For example, you could use a game inside custom email template design purely for recreation purposes.
Make Personalization A Two Way Interaction
Personalisation is an evergreen email marketing tactic. You can use interactive elements to compliment your personalisation efforts. For instance, you can send out three versions of a survey result. You can ask your customer to fill in some details that would give an idea about which version would be most relevant to them. This is a very good way of approaching your readers based on relevance.
If you are looking forward to sending a message about the best music systems under a certain budget, you can let them decide the budget range. By simply making your audience click on their desired price range, you can show them the most relevant options.
The good thing is that they can also explore other options by simply clicking another price range.
Menu Buttons
Menu bars are not limited to websites, as adding them in your custom email templates would allow your recipients to access your email copy in a sorted manner without complicating it. This will enable you to divide your content into parts and saves you from losing engagement.
Accordions are another type of menu that allows you to use interactivity for replacing messages that would otherwise require long scrolls.
Accordions thus will enable you to pack all your information in a small space, much like pillar pages of websites.
Add To Calendar Option
Telling your email list about a webinar or presence in the industry is very common. If they want to attend your event/webinar that day, they must remember the date and time.
Usually, we add the event details in our device calendar. You can make this task easier by offering an inbuilt add to calendar option. Even if the person is not sure about attending it, they will anyway add a reminder in case they might be free or interested at that time.
Interactive Pictures
Interactive images are a great way of visual storytelling. Instead of telling your customers that they will get an item in four colour variants, using an interactive image would go miles. It directly improves the engagement rate while also allowing your readers to feel that they are actively involved in viewing the product.
Apart from images, you can also use other multimedia formats in combination with different elements.
Videos
People are consuming more videos than ever, and most of them would look out for a product video from the brand before making a purchase.
They are one of the most popular content marketing tools, as even Google passes on SEO value for using videos on your website. Using them in your email is an obvious strategy, but you shouldn’t simply embed the whole video. Instead, you can embed the link to a third-party platform like YouTube for your audiences to click and view the video.
This could be a profitable strategy as you could provide the product video or testimonials right inside the message, and your audiences would not have to search them online. It reduces the effort required to make a decision.
GIFs
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format and has been around since the late 80s. GIFs are excellent marketing tools that allow you to introduce video like motion in your email copy. They can spark inquisitiveness, surprise, add humour, and explain processes.
Telling your client about your product/service and actually showing them are two different things. GIFs allow friendly product descriptions which otherwise would have resulted in long textual myriads. They keep the user engaged and also serve as great marketing props. For instance, you can use a GIF to tease your upcoming product or service while also reciprocating different elements inside your mail body.
This creates a sense of narration with the appropriate use of available space.
Allow Users To Take Control In Case Of Doubt
Often, it is not possible to optimise emails for each use case. Themes are one such aspect that varies from person to person, and even for the same person, it may change over the course of time.
For example, Litmus, have used interactive buttons to allow other users to switch between normal and night modes. Using such tactics will help you to enable the customer to optimise the message by themselves.
Instead Of Serving Content Directly, Let Readers Ask For It
Another good method of making your messages interactive is prompting your readers to find out what you have to say.
Instead of directly telling the reader about their performance statistics, you can provide one of these statistics and teased the other two.
Gamify The Messages That Your Readers Are Already Waiting For
Gamification is the use of game-like thinking to motivate the user to complete a certain task. Instead of sending out birthday wishes directly, you can add a scratch card with a hidden message that is again personalised for the user.
You can also use the Rollover Effect for guiding the user’s attention through your email copy. How about putting down a CTA behind an interactive element? Usually, people don’t expect to find a CTA.
This is because all the emails are thoroughly optimised for finding the CTA easily.
Everybody likes getting discounts, and here Bose added a scratch card to bank on this excitement and help readers feel extra rewarded while knowing about the discounts. Gamification can add a touch of excitement and place your CTA as a reward for the recipient instead of a plain, dull click.
Summing Up
Any form of digital marketing can lead businesses into thinking that they are going nowhere. It requires marketers to build dedicated action plans and set KPIs for measuring outcomes.
When it comes to email marketing, getting creative will fetch you skyrocketing improvements in conversion and engagement rates. Interactive elements can turn around the otherwise stereotyped emails and offer value to the messages as it invites the reader to participate. While almost all the emails inside our inboxes are monotonous, interactive emails are highly effective in grasping attention and propelling conversions.
I hope that you find this list of top 6 ways of using interactive elements in your emails useful in wooing your subscribers.
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing full-service email marketing agency. Email Uplers specialises in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration and migration services. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
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