The interactive email does all these things. From simple gifs to microsites, the interactive email solution is coming on strong, and it may replace those apps everyone invested in. Apps have a short shelf life. In fact, apps lose almost two-thirds of their customers within the first 30 days, and as much as eighty percent by the three month mark. Apps have to constantly find new people to sign up, while those using an interactive email model already have the emails of customers.
What is Interactive Email?
Interactive email is exactly how it sounds. It is an email you can send to your customers that will allow them to select tabs and boxes, show image carousels, or allow collapsible content. Interactive email is a type of digital marketing which keeps the customer glued to the content, and allows them to purchase items or accept promotional codes with a click or two of their mouse. This is a new way to interact with known customers, and if done right, they will look forward to receiving emails from your company. Request an assessment and start gaining more customers now!
Sounds Complicated, Tell Me More
The coding to achieve these fantastic feats is HTML and CSS. CSS helps to run most of the visuals on the Internet today, and now emails are no exception. Through CSS animated sprites, checkbox hacking, and other little tricks of the trade, developers can do almost anything seen on the Internet. The one difference is the amount of coding. This creates some limitations, but microsites can be created. In other words, you cannot have a full clothing line displayed for the customer, but you can display a selected item such as a jacket to promote. Customers can click on buttons to change the colors of the jacket, and more importantly, they can purchase the jacket right out of their email.
Ecommerce through Email
In order to have an effective campaign via interactive email you need a solid subscription base. The nature of the CSS beast also limits the email clients you can use. Certain email clients, like Outlook and Yahoo, are not fully CSS functional. If you want to promote your products to these email clients, then you have to decide if you want to tone down the amount of CSS coding, or you may find there is no need to send the promos to those email clients. Luckily, most smartphone email clients do support most CSS functionality. If you choose not to send interactive emails to some clients, then you will need to focus on a larger list of clients. Some ideas for gathering those extra numbers include:
Key Factors to Email Marketing
Email is slowly on the rise as a preferred technique in digital marketing. It was at its peak, but many companies felt the push toward applications, chats, and other venues to reach out to their customer base. These other avenues are still effective, but interactive emails have brought back the email channel as a positive approach to inbound marketing. Email is the best when it comes to delivering ROI, but companies must look at three key factors to really make it shine. These are:
Automation and AI can help sort lists and manage customer needs without lifting a finger. Both of these technologies are slowly integrating into the email world, and as they do they will transform the normal email processes into marketing goliath.
Customer personalizing connects the company with the consumer. The more personalized the email is, the better chance there is of the customer opening the email and responding to it. In a world where there is so much spam flooding into email boxes every day, it is harder to make contact with consumers. Personalization adds a professionalism that helps customers feel better about who they are working with.
Optimizing across multiple devices is more about aesthetics in most cases, but with interactive emails, it is important for the customer to see where the buttons are, where the tabs open, and what the final cost of a purchase is.
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Getting Started
Start thinking about running list counts to get more information about your audience. For instance, try to determine which ones primarily run on mobile devices. To test the waters, try campaigns that run out of season products. Or consider setting up a database of items headed into a “sold out” or “out of stock” venue. Testing the waters with items not currently hot on your got to sell list is a helpful way to find out how many people will buy from emails. Oftentimes, items out of season or going out of stock sell for much cheaper, and this will help give a guideline of what the customer’s price range is when purchasing through this channel.
The key is to try to find the most effective triggers. Continually update the triggers and check them against the customer base to get an idea of what products sell the best and when. Remember, interactive emails can’t support your entire product line so you need to determine which items can and will be bought on impulse.
Interactive email is going to explode, there is no doubt about that. Email is coming back strong, and with new technologies toward cloud computing and interactive customer service, the email industry will be revitalized.
Digital marketing companies are pumping a lot of capital into the next generation of email, and you want to make sure your company is at the forefront of this venture into inbound marketing. Contact us and learn more about how we can help you move forward in the exciting world of interactive email marketing.