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Email marketing has existed since long before the dawn of the World Wide Web.
Last year, we celebrated the 40-year anniversary of this life-changing medium. While email marketing is far from a new concept, it has evolved in spectacular ways. Dynamic content has given birth to a new strategy known as interactive email marketing.
Interactive email relies on dynamic tokens and content to make email more engaging and personalized. There are a number of huge benefits of interactive email:
• Using dynamic content to improve engagement gives customers a more favorable impression of your brand. Using interactive content increases visibility by 400-500%.
• Interactive email can be customized to the needs of individual customers, which increases the likelihood of a conversion by 100%.
• Combining interactive email with email list segmentation makes it easier to identify subscribers that are reluctant to convert and provide offers that could entice them.
Here are some of the ways that you can incorporate interactive email into your marketing strategy in 2018.
Micro-sites in your inbox
In 2018, interactive micro-sites within email will become much more normal for online retail subscribers. This is a big deal because email clients are now starting to support interactive animation within inboxes.
Imagine receiving an email from your favorite online clothing brand where you can browse the latest fashions and purchase without having to ever leave your inbox. That’s what interactive micro-sites can offer. These dramatically improve conversion rates because you don’t lose a large portion of purchases due to click-through rates. Those conversions happen directly in the email.
For designers, these emails are created through HTML and CSS but make sure to use a fallback design in case your email lands in the 30% of email clients that don’t support interactivity.
Using animated GIFs to provide more detail
Animated GIFs are great for boosting email engagement. Marketing Sherpa conducted a case study on Dell, which showed that the company was able to boost conversion rates by 109%.
David Sierk, the head of Email Strategy and Analytics for Dell, stated that this was a great way to educate people about their new line of convertibles.
“No one knows what a convertible is yet,” Sierk told Marketing Sherpa. “It’s not synonymous with products like the tablet is now or anything along those lines.”
However, they can have an even more practical purpose.
Marketing emails need to be concise and direct. As a general rule of thumb, the main offer and call-to-action should be visible above the fold. This can be challenging when you have a lot of information to compact in a small space.
You can use animated images to convey a lot more information in the same space. The image can be designed to show a new message every second or two. This allows you to advertise multiple products at once or describe multiple features of the same product without taking up unnecessary room in your email. Pert’s Organic Coffee used email marketing platform, Campaign Monitor, to create an interactive one-page email to showcase their new flavors. Recipients could click on each flavor to get a glimpse of the caffeinated goodness.
