Static Email? No! Make it Interactive!

Email is static, boring, and not sexy at all. This widely spread image of the channel is proven outdated more and more. Personalized images, real-time data feeds, daily changing content, and image galleries, as well as pre-filled forms, lift the old lady of digital marketing to a new, prospering age.

Luckily, responsive design has become standard in email marketing over the past years. According to a recent research study by Litmus, 77% of companies adopted mobile support for their marketing email.

In addition, the older email clients are slowly dying out – at least in B2C markets. Especially the desktop dinosaurs are being replaced by newer and mobile email clients. Approximately half of email opens appear on mobile devices nowadays. The majority of smartphones and tablets are Apple and support a wide range of features that allow for a new generation of interactive email experiences. A big opportunity for marketers. Learn what can be done with email.

Personalised Images
An image in the email that contains an envelope with your name written on it or the well-known electronic postcard with a personal note in the picture as part of the email: Personalization is not bound to the salutation or dynamically integrated content blocks anymore. Personalized images, rendered in real-time at the moment the recipient opens the email provide a new level of individualization.

Dynamic content loaded when the email is opened

Dynamic images
Delivering images in real-time at the instance of the open of the email provides the chance to personalize them according to (available) content, time and geographic location of the recipient.

Product recommendation based on click or purchase history are how these are often used. Daily changing elements, such as the windows of an advent calendar or even the map guiding the customer to the nearest point of sale, including a picture of the entrance, can be inserted in an email.

That content is still rendered on a server (e.g. product image with discount overlay) or the delivery is controlled by a server side script (e.g. product recommendations) and thus client independent. Still, they are already a kind of dynamic elements in emails.

This was the first in a series of three articles about dynamic and interactive email. Learn how a fully functional advent calendar can be used in an email in the part II and III of this series.

Image: Nasa HQ