Your Business Might Be Missing Out on Interactive Elements in Email Campaigns (Quizzes, Surveys, Videos, Etc.)

Let's be frank—emails can sometimes be boring. After every other company began using similar pictures and plain text formats, emails seemed to bring nothing new. This lack of appeal became evident as more engaging marketing channels like social media and podcasts took the world by storm.

However, email campaigns became more engaging as technology and digital marketing strategies developed over time. Businesses began thinking outside the box and leveraging interactive elements to spice up their email marketing. As a result, emails evolved into an effective strategy that continued to captivate readers.

If you're interested in incorporating interactive emails into marketing strategies to grow your business, this article can help. So, what does an interactive email entail?

What's an Interactive Email?

An interactive email has features allowing recipients to interact and engage with content. They let brands showcase products and services with innovative tools—like surveys, quizzes, and games—to help them stand out amid crowded inboxes.

With a staggering 60% of people likely to engage with interactive emails, this marketing strategy is proving effective in driving leads and conversions while delighting existing customers.

Interactive emails certainly give companies an edge. However, implementing them may be challenging. For instance, gamification will require you to onboard developers to create, maintain, and update the game—making it crucial to consider your business's capabilities when strategizing emails. But what elements can help up your interactive email game?

9 Popular Types of Interactive Email Elements

1. Buttons

Adding buttons to the email body is a simple yet effective way to incorporate interactivity. You can use buttons by themselves. Take it up a notch by using them to complement other elements when emphasizing calls to action and help readers navigate the content.

If you're an online business, buttons can help improve product marketing campaigns. For example, you can add an "Add to Cart" button in emails promoting specific products, automatically adding the item to the customers' shopping carts upon clicking.

Moreover, consider animating buttons to make them stand out from the rest of the content. You can also use colors that change when a mouse pointer hovers over the button or add on-click animations for better engagement.

2. Hyperlinks

While they're not particularly entertaining, hyperlinks do wonders in helping recipients navigate emails, thus improving engagement. Long-form emails tend to bore general audiences. So, having a navigation pane linking to specific headings makes reading more manageable, especially when they only want to read a particular part of the content.

You can also use hyperlinks to take readers to your website. For instance, linking product names to their respective pages on your site is a compelling call to action. Similar to buttons, hyperlinks work best in enhancing other elements' capabilities.

3. Sounds

Audio is known to influence emotions, which means incorporating sound into emails helps brands connect with customers on a deeper level. Consider adding background music or embedding tracks. These sound bites are particularly helpful for marketing songs and musicians. You can even add audio to enhance other elements, like gameshow music for game elements.

Some may argue that music is passive and isn't genuinely interactive. However, incorporating audio is especially helpful for the blind and visually impaired, making emails interactive and accessible.

4. Polls

Feedback on products, services, and overall operations is valuable for business growth, so leverage any tool informing you about customer responses. Polls are handy, especially when you incorporate them into email campaigns and newsletters.

For instance, you can take a shorter and simpler way of knowing which product color your customers prefer. Simply email a poll of colors they can choose from—those with the highest results are your winners. The benefit of this element is that they let you collect responses and feedback directly from customers without fuss, which is particularly helpful for relatively minor decision-making.

5. Quizzes and questionnaires

Want to deliver personalized content while making emails fun and engaging? Consider using quizzes and questionnaires. Suppose your brand is a movie streaming platform. In that case, you may use them to learn more about subscribers' personalities and media preferences to help tailor film recommendations to their tastes.

Collected information from questionnaires also helps enrich customer data collection and analytics. They allow you to implement better email and content marketing personalization strategies to resonate with your target audience more effectively.

6. Games

Make emails more memorable by embedding games into the message's body. Doing so can make campaigns more fun for readers and boost your engagement, similar to quizzes.

You may offer vouchers and discounts as prizes for winning spin-the-wheel, slot machine, or scratch card games to make promotions more fun. Also, consider adding a call to action button directing winners to your ecommerce site. This way, you can entice them to use their prizes immediately.

However, as mentioned, developing even a small game for an email requires a lot of time and resources. It may also fail to appeal to many market segments, such as the older, less tech-savvy generations. So, be sure to strategize games effectively to make your brand more memorable to recipients.

7. Product previews

Consider adding previews to emails if you want to emphasize product features creatively.

Let's say you're a car manufacturer. You can use a 3D snapshot of a model's exterior, letting recipients virtually explore the product using gestures. Furthermore, you can also provide color options that change the vehicle's appearance depending on what the recipient selects to help them visualize it better.

Visiting and navigating your website may be taxing to some, especially those already busy with their inboxes. Giving readers a website-like experience in emails in terms of comprehensiveness can help boost engagement and brand familiarity. Reducing the number of clicks it takes to visit and navigate your site can give your customers a more seamless experience.

8. Interactive images

Similar to product previews, images help readers visualize products and services but with more context.

For example, a travel agency operating in a specific country can embed images labeled Hotels, Museums, and Restaurants. Clicking on Hotels will expand it into a gallery of popular hotels in the country. The agency can then add more information to describe each entry or add links redirecting to booking websites for seamless navigation.

Additionally, interactive infographics with expandable buttons, images, videos, and audio can help recipients stay engaged and better digest information.

9. Ratings

Do your customers forget to leave product or service reviews after every transaction? This issue may be because they find going back into your website or app too troublesome.

So, consider bringing reviews to customers by sending an email that lets them leave ratings on the body. You can add ratings at the bottom of their electronic receipts or "Thank You for Buying" emails to make reviews more accessible.

This implementation benefits online retail, ride-sharing, and food delivery businesses where service quality primarily depends on customer feedback. Star ratings are a convenient and user-friendly format. However, you can add review boxes for more detailed responses.

10. Maps

One of the most versatile email marketing hacks you can implement is maps. For example, you may use them to inform readers creatively about your location. Customer data collection and analytics also come in handy since you can leverage local customers' locations to give them directions to your store or branches.

Alternatively, maps are helpful for geographic data visualization. Say your business specializes in providing overseas outsourcing services. Maps can show the location of the companies you've helped grow in the world. You can then add links to each site, redirecting potential clients to case studies or testimonials to reinforce your services' effectiveness and reputation.

Engage Your Audience with Interactive Emails

In the email marketing landscape, you'll often need to fight tooth and nail to get readers' attention in a sea of newsletters, personal messages, and spam. So, leverage any strategy available to reach your goal.

Fortunately, as technology progresses, so do email capabilities. The interactive elements in this article go a long way to solidifying your brand as an engaging entity that potential and existing customers will love to have in their inboxes.

Ultimately, giving readers a unique experience every time they click on your messages helps you tap into their emotions and boost brand visibility. As a result, you can drive more engaged leads and conversions, taking your business to greater heights.