Interactive email content: 5 ideas to get marketers started

• Updated on: 2017-08-03
• Read original article here

Take this test: Go to your inbox and select the last 10 emails you received from your favorite brands. How many have you actually interacted with? And if you put them side by side, do they all look the same?

While email remains the digital marketing king from an ROI standpoint, many organizations are taking this channel for granted. Instead of embracing the opportunity to take full power and control of this cost-effective channel, they are settling for churning out the same generic messages over and over – but the beauty of marketing is that it’s never too late!

Technology is supporting the growth and rapid development of more sophisticated emails, enabling you to not only ensure that your mailings reach your customers’ inboxes, but also to deliver content that’s more interesting, relevant, and most of all interactive.

Gone are the days of sending emails just to keep your brand top-of-mind and drive direct sales. Nowadays, it’s all about how to get your customers to engage with the content you’re exposing them to — especially as companies are facing much more sophisticated crowds that expect a powerful brand experience to retain their loyalty.

Ticketmaster offers a great recent example of the power of interactive email content. During the 2015 MTV Music Awards, it invited users to vote for their favorite artists directly within an email. The results were spectacular – an open rate 180% higher than normal.

More than ever, we’re in a pull marketing era. Marketing is responding to what customers want and no longer being driven by what brands want. Likewise, content should follow this trend and be oriented toward customers’ interests.

If you deliver content that customers can recognize themselves in, they’ll be more likely to engage and interact with it, enabling you to capture more customer insights and behaviours.

The goal is to allow your audience to participate and contribute. By providing these interactive experiences, rather than static and traditional content, companies can expect to reinforce brand engagement and loyalty on the one hand and aim drive better conversion rates, lead nurturing, and ultimately ROI on the other.

Interactive content is effective because it triggers customers’ psychological senses and gets them active – they become a participant in the content being shared with them.

As the chart below shows, gamifying email is an effective early-stage tactic for interacting with your customers. When content mixes user experience with playful items, users are more inclined to create affinity with the brand.

By using interactive content to build trust and engagement throughout the buying cycle, your emails could become a goldmine from a data point of view, helping you collect precious information that enables you to go deeper with your segmentation.

You don’t have to go full bore the first time you experiment with interactive content. Taking a crawl-to-walk approach is fine. Here are some examples of interactive email content, from simple to advanced:

Incorporating animated GIFs in your messages is a fun way to bring your emails to life and grab the attention of busy, often mobile recipients. Beyond design purposes, animated GIFs can help you illustrate or give a glimpse of a product or feature. It’s a natural first step and an easy way to catch your readers’ attention and clicks.

Did you know that 96% of users who start BuzzFeed quizzes finish them? Inspiring, isn’t it? Having your recipients respond to questions about their preferences and interests is a way for marketers to not only engage recipients, but also gather key information.

Be creative and the chances will be higher for you to generate strong participation – remember the Ticketmaster example?

Aren’t you always after what your clients think of your content? OK, clicks can be an indicator. But wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could get your subscribers’ reaction on the spot? Look at the number of immediate reactions people get when posting something on Facebook – you can encourage similar behaviours on your mailing’s article. Why? Because, with interactive email, it requires just one click.

From a customer engagement standpoint, email sentiment widgets also help bring your customer understanding to the next level and allow you to create a much more personalized customer journey.

Whilst it may sound odd, employing the classic “scratch and win” process to entice customers to discover what they get continues to engage both young and older crowds.

With some mouse hovering and a click or two all that’s necessary to participate, you can expect your customers to be curious enough to play the game.

Why not give your customers the opportunity to purchase directly from your emails? It would surely change the way your emails are being perceived and could be a game changer from an ROI perspective.

It can start by embedding recipients’ shopping carts within the emails to remind them of the current items selected in the cart, enable them to confirm, and set a recurring order (like weekly grocery shopping items) or allow them to modify an existing order.

The next stage of functionality would be to give recipients the opportunity to make product selections directly within the email and simply click on a call to action to be redirected to your payment gateway to complete the order. (Read more: “Interactive email: how marketers can drive e-commerce directly from HTML messages.”)

By responding to all the principles of pull marketing, interactive email content can become your next great ally, contributing both customer insights and greater ROI.

Best of all, the opportunities are as unlimited as your imagination (and technical capabilities)! So, be creative and have fun with it. By putting customers’ interests first, you may be surprised at the positive feedback and strong engagement you drive over time.

For more email marketing tips and strategies, please check out IBM’s “2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Report.”