Email marketing generates the highest Return on Investment (ROI) among other marketing strategies. For investing each dollar in email marketing, you can consider an average return of 38 dollars. Such a cost-effective marketing strategy is the best for many business owners and marketers. Sending out an interactive email is one way to create an email marketing campaign, make a great impression for your business, and grow your sales.
Here in this article, we will read about how to create your first interactive email campaign.
What Is Interactive Email?
The difference between an email and an interactive email is just in being interactive! Sending out bulks of texts without visual design or attractive framework is no longer working. People in the modern era are too exposed to a lot of visuals and concepts to find an email with a body of text interesting. As a consequence, those emails result not only in not receiving the predicted returns but also in more and more unsubscriptions from your email list.
Interactive emails contain interactive textual and visual content that makes reading your email a fun experience. Therefore, your subscribers engage with your email and it is highly likely that they take the action you want them to instead of deleting your email or unsubscription from your list.
So, let’s now see how to make an interactive email for your email marketing campaign.
Best Practices to Create Your First Interactive Email Campaign
Having known the importance and effect of an interactive email campaign, we will now learn how to create an interactive email.
1. Add Motion Graphics
Motion graphics such as GIFs and videos can turn your emails into fun and interactive emails. In comparison to texts, GIFs and videos can not only create a better visual influence on your subscribers but also can show your products and services better. When you want to send out emails to your email subscribers, you should keep in mind that people generally prefer to watch a video about a subject than to spend time reading your text.
In addition to your motion graphics, you can also think about sharing your YouTube videos. All you need to do to get your YouTube video to your email is simply copying and pasting. Videos can engage your subscribers while GIFs can both engage and create excitement for them. There are many tools you can use to create exciting GIFs out of your photos or videos.
Here is an example by Shoemint:
2. Add a Poll
Asking for the opinion of your subscribers who are your customers is important both for your future business strategies and the sense of self-importance that you induce. When you ask for their opinion, you encourage them to interact with your email and your business as a whole. The means to ask their opinion are a poll or a survey.
You can add a link to your poll or survey in your email and ask your email subscribers to take action toward them. But what if they do not tap or click on your link? To avoid such destructive action, you can eliminate that extra step and embed a poll or survey directly in your email. This way, you have created a visual design in your email as well as getting your email subscribers involved and interacted with your email.
The format of your poll and survey depends totally on you. You can ask for their feedback using a multiple-choice question, sliding scales, etc. Remember to also add your business logo on top of your poll or survey before embedding it into your email.
Look at this survey by a library:
3. Ask Them to RSVP
If your business organizes regular events, online or in-presence, you can invite your customers by sending out invitation templates. However, the function of your email should not be just announcing them. Rather, you should involve them to take an action toward your email so that you can make clear calculations for your events.
Make your announcement emails more interactive. Ask your recipients to RSVP to your event through their email inbox. So, they can respond to your invitation via email. But how to do this to really make your subscribers take an action? The answer is a Call-to-Action or CTA button.
Add an RSVP button to your email that leads your recipients to a page where they can fill in the registration form for your event. Hence, everything will be done smoothly and effectively. If you do not want to add an RSVP button, you should send follow-up emails. There are email follow up tools that can make it an auto follow up. You can also check out examples of follow-up emails to get an idea of the context.
If you want more effectiveness and more participants, you can also add social buttons to your email. Your subscribers can share your event with their friends on social media and social networks. It would be a way to get yourself known via other social media so you will get a lot of followers on different platforms in addition to the organic followers you get by doing follow and unfollow on Instagram, for instance.
This is how you can create an interactive email for inviting more participants to your event.
4. Add Interactive Images
Creating interactive emails is also possible by adding images to your emails. However, the image should be something beyond ordinary images that only have the function of showing something to an audience. The image that you add has to be interactive.
An interactive image allows your email subscribers to click on the image to make it move like an animation, show popup videos, or simply reveal more information about what the image is showing. For instance, if it is an interactive image of your products or services, the additional information can be the prices, sizes, colors, compatibilities, etc.
No matter if your email recipients are using their laptops or smartphones to read your email, they can interact with your image and gain way more than a mere visual effect.
Look at this example:
5. Think of Gamification
Gamification is an awesome way to get your email subscribers to interact with your emails. It is not a kind of strategy that is commonly used by all the businesses in some of their interactive emails. However, it would be great if you can add games to your interactive emails to get people to play on their laptops and smartphones.
Promoting any aspect of your business through interactive email would have much better results if you consider gamification in them. Your marketing team can come up with various gamification ideas for your promotions. For instance, one idea for your Black Friday promotion can be to add three kinds of offers and asking your email recipients to do something by chance (i.e. pressing a button) to win one of the offers (e.g. a 20% off promo code).
Consider this example by Email on Acid:
Conclusion
The above mentioned interactive email examples and interactive email designs can help you look out the box and improve your marketing emails. Interactive emails facilitate the interactions with your emails and help you achieve your marketing goals. However, one thing you should pay attention to is that you should avoid using all these ideas in one email because it leads to an unorganized email in which your CTA buttons cannot capture the attention.
If you want your email marketing strategy to be fruitful, you should only include one of the above ideas in each of your interactive emails. This way, you both entertain your email subscribers and attain your marketing goal.
