Are interactive emails the future of email marketing?: Some might think that email marketing is an archaic form of marketing. But in reality, email marketing has come leaps and bounds. Today, emails have become highly interactive, and you can complete all the necessary actions right from your inbox. Below, you will learn about interactive emails and how they can be beneficial for your business. In addition, you can find Best Mailchimp alternatives on internet.
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What are interactive emails?
If an email has all the functionalities which can prompt the reader to take the necessary deemed-fit by the sender, they are known as interactive emails. The degree of interactivity in an email varies according to the needs of the brands and the campaign goals. Through interactive emails, the subscriber can directly add items to their shopping carts, book rooms, take the quiz or watch videos right in their inbox. Your interactive emails can be as simple as containing a drop-down menu to navigate through the different sections of your webpage.
The idea behind putting interactive content in your email is to promote more customer engagement. A report by Martech Advisor shows that interactive elements like videos and other visual elements increased the click rates by almost 300%. GIFs, menu navigation features, images, and slider features are similarly effective. In a nutshell, to stand out in your subscriber’s inbox, you need to create more personalized and interactive emails.
What are the advantages of using interactive emails?
Here are a few advantages of using interactive emails in your marketing strategy.
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Increase in open rates
An average person receives more than 120 new emails per day but only responds and interacts with a quarter of them. Therefore, you need to add a little extra in your emails to convince your subscribers to open them. In addition to that, the open rate of an email is a key metric that allows email marketers to gauge the performance of their email campaigns. And interactive emails are known to increase the click-to-open rate of emails by almost 73%.
Taco Bell uses a code-heavy HTML email template to create its holiday marketing campaign. As you can see, they have integrated an entire game in their email. This kind of email breaks the monotony of regular emails and is sure to make the subscriber smile.
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Retain the attention of your readers
The attention span of readers is decreasing every year. Currently, the average attention span of an average human is around 8 seconds. At this point, it has become a necessity for email marketers to come up with interactive emails that can retain the attention of the reader long enough to take the necessary action. Interactive emails can do so by increasing the engagement rate.
PlayStation’s 2019 wrap-up retains the attention span of their readers with this curiosity-inducing interactive email template. They hide some of the stats of the players behind a “tap to reveal” feature. It compels the readers to engage with the email for a longer time.
What are the challenges faced by email marketers while using interactive emails?
Interactive emails are surely a game-changer, but they come with their own share of challenges.
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Not-so-easy to create
Creating HTML email templates to display interactive elements like a drop-down menu or slide navigation is comparatively simpler. But coding something like the add-to-cart feature can be quite complex as it involves transferring and managing data from the email to your webpage. Such features can unnecessarily drain your resources if they are poorly implemented.
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Decrease in measurability
Email marketing is well-known for its measurability. However, this is only true for emails that have static features. When the interactive visual elements are added to the email, it becomes difficult to track the engagement rates of the different elements. This can pose a lot of problems for email marketers to track their campaigns.
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Decrease the visits to webpages
Certain interactive emails provide different menu options to enable the reader to browse through the different sections of the webpage right from their inbox. However, this decreases the chances of their visit to your webpage. This feature of interactive emails can invalidate one of the major goals of email marketing- driving traffic to your website.
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Interactive emails are not supported by all email clients
Interactive emails are yet to be supported by the majority of email clients. They require extensive coding, some of which might not work in certain email applications. Hence, email HTML developers have to rely on fallback codes. Therefore, before you decide to run an interactive email marketing campaign, you should refer to the email client usage data from your customers and subscribers. Then you can run segmentation tactics and send interactive emails to a select few subscribers.
Conclusion
A Litmus report suggests that 21% of the brands have started using interactive emails in their marketing campaigns. The various email clients have started updating their servers to support the coding of these emails. Yet, there is a lack of high-level HTML email developers in the market. Interactive emails are lauded as the future of email marketing campaigns, and that future is not too far away.
Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.
