We all know the importance of creating a strong digital presence. A large part of this is working to create engaging emails and offers that have the potential to go viral. The success of your marketing initiatives depends greatly on how well you are able to connect with your email recipients. Interactive emails help to achieve engagement, connect with prospects, and thus boost your email campaign performance. This is why it is so important to have expert email developers for interactive emails on your team.
What is an Interactive Email?
An interactive email is an email that utilizes a variety of different features to draw interest and encourage your recipients to install your app, purchase your product, sign up for your service, or just engage with your email.
The interactive elements may include GIF animation, Flip and Scratch effects, Countdown timers, Games, Sliders, among others. These elements make the emails more fun and interesting.
For example, consider the following interactive email from EmailMonks that delivers a mini-game to its readers. Not only does gamification increase engagement multiple-fold, but it also keeps the festive spirit alive, ensuring that readers are more likely to remember the brand.
An interactive email will typically include a call-to-action button or link that allows the user to engage with the content in the email in more detail. For instance, they can learn more about a new product or sign up for a trial membership, or just enter the next level of the game! This is why it’s important that you have expert developers on your side who understand how to create a flawless and compelling design.
If you don’t have a good grasp of what goes into creating interactive emails, here are some reasons why you may want to bring in the experts:
#1 – Developing a Professional and Attractive Interactive Email Design
If your email recipients feel that your email doesn’t offer them anything new, or if it’s simply too dense, then you’ll lose their attention and interest. That is why having a great interactive email design to catch the eye of these customers is so important.
When you work with an expert, you are able to get a more professional looking and perfect interactive email design that your potential customers will want to engage with. A good design coded to perfection can make all the difference in whether or not someone is going to engage with your interactive email.
Few best practices of great interactive email design that an expert can help you with include:
- Being concise with every visual element.
- Having the best possible layout of all elements in the interactive email.
- Including elements of personalization.
- Including unique visual elements.
- Experimenting with and optimizing the CTAs.
- A/B testing all design elements and interactivity.
- Including an email signature design.
#2 – Executing Impeccable Email Coding and Testing
Coding interactive emails is no easy feat.
So much so that it can even be a month long tirade at times!
Interactive emails often have a tendency to misalign in stacking from desktop to mobile versions. This often results in broken emails, such that they can directly affect the ROI of your interactive email campaigns.
On the other hand, not testing your interactive emails can negatively affect your key metrics such as click rates, among other factors. Ultimately, your overall branding suffers. Here are some reasons why you need to hire an expert email developer when it comes to your interactive email campaigns:
- It is much easier to get broken email designs than you may realize.
- Sending out an interactive email with broken links or incorrect information is completely avoidable if you design your emails correctly.
- Embarrassing typos and poor grammatical errors can cost you more in interactive emails since the entire user experience is riding on the copy.
- Interactive emails commonly have multiple important images to include when compared to everyday emails, which makes robust testing and expert opinion even more crucial.
#3 – Imparting Mobile Responsiveness To Interactive Emails
With mobile usage on the rise, you need to ensure you’re able to send emails that will work on a variety of screen sizes. If your interactive email isn’t responsive, recipients will get an error when trying to engage with it. And you definitely want your emails to be delivered in the way that you intend them to. If they resize at will, the interactivity may not appear as expected, making your user experience go down the drain.
It is crucial to optimize your interactive emails for mobile because:
- Mobile users drive at least half the traffic of all opened emails.
- They produce much higher conversion rates than desktop users.
- Emails that render incorrectly on mobile devices may be deleted within 3 seconds.
Hence, hiring an experienced email developer becomes paramount since he/she can take care of the nuances of the trade such as:
- Paying attention to pretext headers.
- Always developing and using a responsive design for interactive emails.
- Keeping the text and design elements minimalistic for mobile accessibility.
- Being extra cautious and selective with images and videos.
- Using clear CTAs that render correctly on varying screen sizes.
- Optimizing the landing pages for maximum conversions.
- Rigorously testing the interactive elements in the email on different browsers and devices.
#4 – Integrating and Optimizing Your Emails
In the digital age, email marketing is no longer enough. With so many tools available for marketers to utilize and promote brands online, why not integrate your interactive emails with these? By optimizing this strategy for every subscriber you have on your list, you can ensure that each one of them receives a highly tailored message from what they want or need at any given time.
The expert will ensure everything is working in a way that is going to make your messages more effective. This can have profound benefits for your interactive email campaigns:
- You can deliver hyper-relevant content to every subscriber such that they actually start looking forward to your emails.
- There are more opportunities for analytics across multiple platforms due to better integration potential.
- Over time, you build better relationships with your audience since your interactive emails are more personalized.
- It is easier to realize much better ROI than other social media channels.
#5 – Managing Interactivity Support of Various Email Clients
Since interactive emails are accompanied by complex designs and coding paradigms, they are not supported by all email clients. This presents certain unique challenges for marketers, ones that they might not have experienced before. For example, your interactive email designers/developers might need to code fallbacks for those recipients who are using unsupported email clients.
You may have realized by now that if done wrong, interactive emails are not as easily measured as other generic email campaigns. You might need to use holistic email client usage data and manage every possible ‘failure’ scenario to arrive at the true metrics.
Thus, there is a definite need to hire an expert interactive email developer, one that has the experience and skill to add additional open tracking pixels that can track all required micro-interactions.
When Do You Need To Hire An Email Expert?
There are various components to consider when deciding whether or not it’s time to bring in the experts for creating interactive emails. Here are some questions to help you decide:
- How many users do you send to?
- Do these users act on your emails as anticipated?
- What is the revenue per user that your current or previous email efforts have been yielding?
- Are there any reporting tools in place to help you analyze and improve upon potential problems, such as spam complaints?
- What are some of your biggest concerns with respect to creating interactive emails?
- In general, how effective are your current email efforts?
- What steps have been taken to improve email effectiveness in the past?
- How is your current marketing budget allocated and how does it compare to budget allocations of other companies in similar niches or industries? Are you satisfied with the results?
- How much have you spent on creating interactive emails in the past?
- Are you looking at using your current budget more effectively or are you looking to expand? Is there a specific goal that is driving your efforts?
- If we’re talking about six months or even a year from now, how do you envision your email marketing efforts and return on investment will be?
If you have been unable to answer a majority of these questions, now might be the time to look into ways to improve your interactions with customers. You can start by talking to email experts and learning more about interactive emails.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is clear that you need to have an expert email developer to create interactive emails. Not only can they help with the content, but also with finding the best images and videos, a professional and attractive design, sending mail faster and more effectively, making sure customers view your interactive emails just the way you want them to and keep engaging with your emails.