Done successfully, email marketing opens endless possibilities to create deeper connections and drive sales. But, even world-class brands have been known to abandon the dynamic marketing they are known for in other channels when it comes to email. Designing emails that engage, delight, and motivate people to act is crucial.
Interactive Content > Static Content
At Response Media, we leverage appealing content and innovative email design with behavioral subscriber data and automation to create kinetic emails for brands. Emails employing GIFs, customization, personalization, and interactivity increase engagement across the board. They invite more productive personal interactions, develop deeper connections, increase sales, and drive better results between brands and their audiences.
Other experts within the industry agree:
- Martech Advisor reports interactive email content increases the click-to-open rate by 73%.
- According to DemandGen, 91% of B2B buyers prefer to consume interactive and visual content.
- Kapost has found interactive content generates twice as many conversions as passive content.
- A survey from Campaign Monitor discovered respondents find interactive content more enticing than images and videos. They prefer GIFs (69%), video (65%), and interactivity (82%) over traditional static emails.
This does not mean you should implement interactivity for the sake of interactivity. The product or idea must drive the nature of the interactivity, or it runs the risk of feeling cheap or gimmicky. Here are a few examples and success stories to illustrate the idea of interactive and engaging campaigns.
What Makes Kinetic Emails Different?
Kinetic emails offer a more visual and engaging experience without subscribers having to leave the inbox. They bring together multiple components, transitions, and animations built with HTML5 and CSS to respond to user actions in a fully interactive email. These high-impact interactive components can include hover-over animations, rotating banners, carousels, sliders, interactive shopping carts, surveys, and games.
Allowing – or requiring – a subscriber to engage actively and participate with content to access the full experience drives engagement. It’s one thing to talk about your brand being a versatile part of a variety of recipes; it’s another thing to reinforce this by showing them.
The below example from Silk reinforced brand benefits and demonstrated versatility by incorporating dynamic flowing oat milk or almond milk pouring into a seasonal recipe. The execution allowed shoppers to find appealing recipes, which encouraged scrolling. Significantly, as they scrolled deeper, their recipe preferences were updated, allowing for future personalization.
An Opportunity to Learn About Your Buyers
Kinetic emails provide a platform for gaining additional information about buyers to deliver better experiences and close the sale. Insights from email interactions plus declared data are valuable to all brands.
Communicating brand stories and marketing campaigns often requires a lot of detailed information. Interactive emails allow brands to convey key messages in an easier-to-understand manner than traditional emails.
To create the most value between the STōK brand and its consumers, we realized additional information was needed. Using kinetic emails was the perfect tool to let the brand and consumer understand one another at a deeper level, including establishing benchmark purchase behavior.
The above email led to a detailed survey, allowing STōK to collect in-depth data from more than 20% of all subscribers. Asking buyers what they want to see from the brand instead of guessing shows (in the words of the brand), “Hmm, useful. STōK gets me,” instead of, “Hmm, what the…?”
Shorter User Journeys
A kinetic design gives users more reasons to click and engage with an email, leading to increased conversions and removing the steps to purchase.
For this International Delight email, interactive elements allowed the brand to highlight multiple unique, fun recipes Creamer Nation members missed in previous emails. The email format allowed people to click on the carousel thumbnails to get a better look before deciding to click through to the recipe. This design feature showcased four times more recipes than a static email and delivered a higher re-engagement and coupon redemption rate than the traditional approach.
The benefit is even more significant for brands employing a direct-to-consumer or e-commerce model. Kinetic emails can also utilize an embedded shopping cart in the email. This option encourages shoppers to spend more and helps them avoid the pain point of clicking through a long sequence of links to buy the promoted items.
Three Pitfalls for Kinetic Emails
Kinetic emails are a great tool to drive brand engagement and sales, but creating and executing flawless emails requires expertise. There are a few challenges to consider:
- All email inboxes and inbox providers don’t support kinetic email interactivity. iOS supports almost all experiences, while Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL have limitations. For example, Outlook degrades some effects (such as carousels) and renders the experience as an animation or even a static image. We always suggest designing “fallback experiences” to ensure there are no deliverability or accessibility issues.
- Coding interactive emails is not as easy as standard emails. The design of kinetic emails requires incremental time for development and QA. Despite the added time and effort, the return on investment from these emails is usually high.
- Interactions in the inbox can be challenging to measure, and different metrics from a standard campaign must be employed. Many actions consumers take within a kinetic email go beyond a hyperlink click. Best practice is to make a plan upfront between the email agency and the brand to align on what can be measured and the best methodology to employ.
The results showcased above are just a few of the success stories of brands building dynamic relationships to grow their businesses. As an agency, this is a core service offering; it is part of our growth model flywheel. The growth model facilitates innovative, engaging, and personal digital connections at scale. For every client, we develop and implement a customized, rigorous optimization strategy to achieve growth.
If you need help orchestrating more creative and engaging email marketing, contact us to see how we can help.
