Aquibur RahmanEmail marketing has become more and more engaging over the years. In the very beginning, emails were plain text only. As simple as black text on a white background, with no real design to speak of.
Then we got HTML emails where you can make visually appealing emails by adding images, animated gifs, layouts, and text markup. That is more engaging, but not yet interactive.
With the addition of interactive elements, now email marketers can get better conversions. Interactive email marketing opens up way more options. And with the introduction of AMP for emails, the content can be updated in real-time.
Let’s look at 8 inspiring interactive email examples for you to copy today.
What is AMP for email?
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for email is an open framework by Google that lets you make your emails interactive and dynamic.
The launch of AMP for email opened new opportunities for email marketers:
- Content updates in real-time. Information is updated in your email as and when the changes happen.
- The audience interacts with email content.
- Recipients can fill out forms and perform other actions without leaving their inboxes.
- Emails to mimic a microsite within the email body.
8 examples of things that email subscribers can do with interactive emails:
- scroll image carousels inside emails
- add items to the shopping cart
- open a product card, choose and buy the products
- participate in surveys or polls right in the inbox
- reply to comments in an email
- RSVP to an event
- track the end of sale or discount offers with a countdown timer
- subscribe to newsletters with a one-click in-mail button
Recommended reading: 150+ ways to use AMP for Email (and Save Interactive Email)
Interactive email? What’s that?
An interactive email is an email that allows the recipients to interact with it. And the content will change because of the interaction. It has different interactive elements that open the door for much more interaction than just clicking. An interactive element can be anything from a scratch card to a survey or a rating scale.
You probably know of email newsletters with animated gifs or branded videos. You can only watch them, but can’t interact with these elements. We don’t consider these types of emails interactive.
Interactive emails contain at least 1 element the recipient can interact with. And based on that reaction the content of the email will change.
You can interact by:
- Filling in details in a form
- Clicking
- Dragging
- Hovering your cursor over an interactive element
- Browsing through a list of products or carousel of product images
- Rating a product
- Giving feedback
In the GIF below, you can see how an interactive email is allowing the recipient to interact with the elements of the email.
The recipient is able to open the email, give a rating, answer a question, and even write feedback. After this, they’ll even get a thank you message. All without leaving the inbox.
Interactive emails with and without AMP
Interactive emails can be created with or without AMP. A carousel of products within an email is a good example. You can even have complete games in an email without AMP.
In interactive emails with AMP, you get to do all the things that you can in emails without AMP but it is also dynamic. The key here is the word dynamic. Readers get to see live information updated within the emails, compared to static data with non-AMP emails. AMP for email allows information to be updated in real-time.
An excellent example is booking seats for a show within an email. The available seats are updated when seats get booked by others. This means that it’s easy to avoid double-booking because the same seating is shown to everyone.
8 interactive email examples that you can start sending today
AMP for email gives email marketers endless opportunities to send interactive emails. Let’s go through some common uses:
1. Conduct NPS or star rating surveys
We know how important customer feedback is for everyone. You must know how your business is doing. An interactive email campaign is great for that.
Let’s say you manage a restaurant and want to get feedback from your customers about their dining experience. You can send interactive emails to your customers where they can:
- Rate your service or food using star ratings or NPS rating
- Write feedback for your restaurant
You’ll get more answers with email surveys because there’s less friction. Recipients don’t need to click a single link to go to a landing page. No need to wait for the page to load and then fill out the survey.
Get more NPS submissions with email surveys
The payment gateway solution, Razorpay, increased NPS survey responses by 257% with AMP emails.
They saw such results because merchants loved the email where they could share their thoughts without getting redirected even once.
2. Plan meetings
Planning meetings can be a hassle. Of course, you can just send a simple email to your attendees stating the time, date, and the required links. But what happens when there is a last-minute change? It creates miscommunication.
AMP emails are better for planning meetings because:
- AMP emails have content that updates in real-time. You can have a list of names which will be updated when attendees respond to a meeting invite.
- You can update important details like a change in time, date, or link.
Case Study: Increase demo booking with embedded forms
With decreased friction because of the embedded form, Hobspace saw a 20% increase in demo bookings with Mailmodo.
They used AMP calendars for demo bookings inside emails. The booking slots were fetched from their internal servers. So the booking process was made simpler for both the customer and the company.
3. Get registrations for webinars
When you are trying to get registrations for your webinar, normal emails have links that users click and visit another page where they can register. When you redirect your audience to another page, you lose some of the subscribers because it takes longer.
To have people sign up for webinars or even subscribe to your email newsletter is a breeze with interactive emails. The form for signing up for webinars is integrated within the email itself. This means fewer steps for recipients to register, better engagement, and more conversions. You also get integration with third-party apps like Zoom and Calendly.
Example: Increase webinar signups with AMP forms
The crypto trading platform Mudrex got a 2.8X increase in their webinar sign-ups.
By using an Airmeet integration, they simplified a 3 step registration process into one. And the result was fewer drop-offs and an increase in conversions.
4. Recover abandoned carts
Data from 41 different studies found that the average cart abandonment rate is 69.8%.
Interactive emails replace product links with a fully interactive abandoned cart widget. This increases the recovery rate.
Even though customers can’t pay within the email itself, with interactive emails:
- Customers can scroll through the items in the cart and make changes.
- Redirect customers to pay with a click on the ‘Checkout button.
5. Recommend products
Customers engage more when they receive personalized promotional codes and special offers. Ecommerce stores track customer behavior to get an idea of preferences based on customer activity. This helps brands recommend relevant products to their customers.
Interesting Read: The proper spelling of eCommerce
Send product recommendation emails to your eCommerce customers, including:
- A curated catalog with images and details for each product
- Limited-time special offers or discounts using a countdown timer
- Promotions for a new line of products
- And one-click checkouts
6. Get reviews for products
Getting feedback is vital for a business. Customers think of leaving a review as a favor. And if that favor requires too much time or effort from them they aren’t going to do it.
Interactive emails make it easier for the customers to leave a review with the form inside the email. So you get more responses.
Companies can go with a simple star rating system with or without the text input.
7. Make emails fun with gamification
Gamification is when you integrate game elements into non-game environments, like business software or email. Having games in your interactive emails makes them fun which increases engagement.
Businesses nowadays integrate games like spin the wheel or slot machines with levers to add interactivity.
And customers love playing with them, getting lucky, and winning a discount coupon to shop from their favorite store.
Games you can have in an email
Here are some games and widgets that can be included in your emails:
- Spin the Wheel
- Wordle
- Quiz
- Scratch cards
- Puzzles
8. Getting reorders
Returning customers are an invaluable asset for any company. Some eCommerce stores even have subscriptions for regular-use products.
Customers order certain daily-use products on a regular basis. Ecommerce stores can analyze the intervals between orders. This information can be used to send emails reminding the customers to buy the product when it is time to.
Such email campaigns are especially useful for products with a short life cycle, like clothes, razors, and cosmetics.
With interactive emails:
- Users can reorder products with a click inside the email which lands them on the payment page.
- Increase sales with periodical reminder emails.
How to Create Interactive Emails – The Easiest Way
Interactive emails are more engaging, visually appealing, and have a higher ROI.
All those perks came with a learning curve, where you had to learn to code. Well, not anymore.
ESPs like Mailmodo help you to create and send interactive emails. You also have 50+ templates to choose from. Here are the basic steps to make your own interactive email:
Step 1 – Choose your template
The first step of creating an interactive email is to choose your template. You will get a range of templates to choose from, each for a different purpose like conducting a survey or a sign-up form for a webinar.
Step 2 – Customize your template
Once, you have chosen the right template for yourself. Make some simple tweaks and you have your template ready.
With Mailmodo’s drag-and-drop editor you can:
- Drag and drop any elements into the right place.
- Change the color scheme to match your brand palette
- Add the logo of your brand, brand header, footer, etc.
- Add the interactive elements that you want in your mail like a carousel and make changes to them.
Step 3 – Test your email template
After you save your template, test it to check if all your interactive elements display well across the major email clients. You can use the following method to test your email for Gmail and G-suite:
- Gmail’s AMP for Email playground helps you draft, preview, and send your AMP emails to your account for testing
- In your Gmail account’s developer settings, you can whitelist an email address through which you can send AMP emails for testing.
- Alternatively, Mailmodo has a simple in-built feature that lets you send a test email to one or more email addresses. You can then check across devices and email clients to see if it’s rendering correctly.
Wrapping it up
Interactive emails are the new best friends of innovative email marketers. AMP has changed the way customers interact with emails. And how marketers use them for promotions.
We now have interactive email design which in turn increases conversion rates.
You don’t even need to know how to code to make interactive emails anymore. You can simply choose from a list of templates available, make some changes and have your email ready.
Rukham Khan
Yauhen Zaremba
