Email marketing has provided businesses with the highest ROI out of all the different marketing channels. For every $1 that is invested into email marketing,$44 is generated on average. Email marketing allows businesses to nurture their relationships with customers and prospects, stay top of mind, and build trust. Although most companies use email marketing to generate leads and sales, they often underutilize or ignore interactive emails for their campaigns. In this post, we’ll cover how businesses can leverage interactive emails and the different benefits they can get from doing this.
What are interactive emails?
Interactive emails are emails with interactive elements that incentivize users to engage with your emails. These elements include images, videos, shopping carts, reviews, and more. Instead of having the typical text-only email that most email subscribers receive, interactive emails stand out because they offer a more interactive and engaging experience. This ultimately helps improve your email marketing by increasing click-through rates, conversion rates, and subscriber engagement.
Examples of interactive emails
The example above is from an email sent by Mint.com to one of its users. The entire email is interactive, there are no text boxes or areas that are text-only. If you hover over the infographic, you can download your subscriptions. Additionally, if you click the CTA “see my subscriptions”, you’ll be redirected to your Mint.com account and see your current subscriptions. From beginning to end, this interactive email incentivizes users to engage with the email by clicking CTAs or downloading data from the images.
This interactive email from Delta is a great example of using imagery in email marketing. In this email, four pictures have links to a product Delta is selling. It’s simple, clickable, and entices the user to engage with the email. Delta also did a great job by personalizing this email to the user. Each link on each picture shows how far away the location is from where the user last took a flight.
Caribou Coffee also does a great job using interactive emails in its email marketing campaigns. The interactive email above features a 50% off deal that also expires in a few days. Along with the offer, they’ve added an interactive button that entices users to click to redeem their offer. Once the user clicks the button, they can find their nearest Caribou Coffee location and use their 50% off coupon. This is a great example of utilizing both interactive emails and your offer to increase engagement and sales.
Benefits of interactive emails
Using interactive emails like the ones mentioned above can help improve your email marketing in several ways. Some of the best benefits of using interactive emails include:
1. Higher engagement
With platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube dominating users’ attention, email marketing cannot afford to be stale and boring. If you’re sending out emails that are text-only or have little interactive elements, you won’t have nearly as much engagement as using interactive emails in your campaigns. This is especially important if you’re selling B2C (business to consumer) or DTC (direct to consumer) products.
Adding just little interactive elements to your emails can improve your engagement rates. This can be something as simple as an infographic or a video. If you want to take it a step further, you can use interactive emails with quizzes, contests, or polls can increase your engagement. The longer your user stays on your email and interacts with different elements, the more likely they are to follow your CTA and make a purchase.
2. Increase conversion rates
Even with the best email copywriting, static email content can be improved by adding interactive elements. Many businesses resort to using email copy like using CAPS LOCK, bolding, or italicizing their copy. Although this can bring more attention to some parts of your email, it’s much better to use an interactive element like a timer or CTA button on your email. Instead of writing copy like “This deal expires in 24 hours”, you can simply add something like a timer to showcase when the deal is finished. This doesn’t look unprofessional and your email subscribers are much more likely to engage with it.
Interactive emails can increase your conversions by allowing you to leverage different interactive elements like buy buttons, timers, or even interactive forms. By using these elements, you can guide your users toward taking the desired action without bombarding them with a wall of text. This can help you maintain your brand while using interactive features to improve your conversion rates.
3. More A/B testing
The best email marketers are the ones that test every part of their email marketing routinely. This includes subject lines, email copy, offers, etc. Don’t believe that interactive emails will help your email marketing, test it. You can segment your audience and test how effective different interactive email elements are. Over time, you’ll find that your interactive emails will likely far outperform your static emails. You can test many parts of interactive emails. This includes different images, polls, buttons, videos, etc.
Here’s how you can A/B test interactive emails in your campaigns:
Control segment: You can start by segmenting your email campaigns with your control segment. This should be your normal email campaign with your average subject line, email copy, offer, CTA, etc.
Interactive segment: Your interactive segment should be the same as your control segment, but you add just one interactive element. An example of this can be a buy button CTA instead of using static text with a link.
By using control and interactive segments for your email campaigns, you can test how effective interactive emails are first-hand. Continue to tweak and test and you’ll find the best-performing emails for your marketing campaigns.
4. Follow-up sales
A major benefit to using interactive emails is the ability to do high-engagement follow-up sales and reviews for your services. Most companies typically send a follow-up email when a customer has an abandoned cart or abandoned a step in their sales process. In most cases, these are text-based emails, and customers usually ignore and trash them after reading the first line.
Interactive emails allow you to remove the friction in that process by allowing you to add clickable pictures and links in your follow-up emails. Instead of reminding the user to go back to their abandoned cart, show them their abandoned cart. This is far more likely to get engagement than writing a long text about a specific product they added to their cart.
A good example of a company using interactive emails to get follow-up sales and reviews is Split My Fare. Split My Fare is a train service company based in the UK. They drive approximately 38,000 visitors to their cheap train tickets page every month. Thousands of these visitors turn into email subscribers. Through email marketing, Split My Fare can continuously follow up with these customers and generate follow-up sales with interactive emails. They can show customers which destinations they’re going to, the price, etc with interactive emails.
5. Get more reviews on your product or service
Many companies struggle with getting reviews for their products or services. Some companies even offer gift cards or redeemable codes just to get a single review from a user. Although the offer is good, most users have to do too much to leave a review. You can remove a lot of the friction of generating reviews by using interactive emails.
Just like with follow-up sales, interactive images in your email can lead customers to leave you a review with just a few clicks. You can include an image of a product that the customer purchased and a review widget that will allow them to quickly select a 1-5 star review. This review can get published on your site or on any platform you sell online on. You can even have your review widget open up a new tab where the customer can leave an in-depth review.
You can automatically add this email sequence whenever a customer purchases a product or service from you. Instead of sending the generic “Thank you for purchasing” email, you can create an interactive email and include an offer for your users to leave a review. This can quickly compound and generate dozens if not hundreds of reviews for your business.
These are just a few of the benefits you can expect from using interactive emails instead of static emails. With more interactive elements in your emails, you can expect higher engagement rates, follow-up sales, and more product reviews for your business. You can start using interactive emails by embedding HTML code into your non-interactive emails. This will allow you to add different widgets, features, and elements to your email.
