The Power of Interactive Emails: How They Can Boost Your Marketing ROI

While other platforms have evolved with time, emails have remained static. Most emails in our inbox ask us to click on a CTA. Undoubtedly, brands still see results from such emails, but on the downside, they risk losing conversions due to many redirections.

And as the attention span is lower than ever, brands must find and adopt innovative and creative ways to deliver a customer-centric experience inside email.

This is where the interactive emails come into the picture. Interactivity makes emails smarter and frictionless by bringing the landing page inside the email. Combined with relevant messaging and outstanding design, you can boost your email marketing performance.

The premise of interactivity inside email sets on Fewer Clicks → More Conversions. Bringing action inside the email eliminates the friction of shifting from one medium to another.

In this article, I’ll outline how you can use interactive emails in your campaigns to boost conversions and ROI.

1. Bringing a landing page inside the email

Email is treated as a medium to drive traffic to the landing pages through multiple redirections.

But, with interactivity, actions often associated with landing pages — sharing product reviews, referring a newsletter to a friend, signup for a webinar, or completing a transaction, are possible inside email. 

For example,

• ● With AMP NPS surveys, you can collect customer feedback without redirecting them to your landing page. This leads to a higher submission rate as the drop-off points are nil.
• ● With the AMP referral widget, you can compel subscribers to share your newsletter with their networks by entering the details in the email.

As these actions are possible inside email due to AMP emails, the conversion rates tend to be higher, leading to higher ROI.

2. Shorten the customer journey

A typical email customer journey looks like this: You send an email → Recipient clicks on the CTA → Gets redirected to the webpage/app → Complete the action.

The chances of conversions using this approach are bleak as you're causing friction by asking your customers to take many steps. Someone might click on the CTA and land on the website but doesn't complete the action, OR others might not even be willing to click to get redirected.

AMp interactive emails reduce such instances as you are bringing the action to the user inside the email. So, the journey looks like this: You send an email with a registration form → Recipient fills out the form and submits it.

As a result, there is less friction and no redirection. So, the chances of drop-offs are reduced, which would ultimately lead to a better conversion rate.

For example, adding a shopping cart to their email lets users complete purchases without leaving their inboxes. This is also helpful in recovering lost sales from abandoned cart users and generating 15% higher conversions with AMP carts.

Another example is one-click event registration inside the email. With Mailmodo’s Add to Calendar widget, recipients can register for an event with a single click. Think about the number of registrations going up with such frictionless events.

3. Gamification leads to improved user experience

With interactivity, it’s possible to embed gamified elements such as quizzes, polls, scavenger hunts, and sprint wheels inside the emails. The use cases of gamification elements inside emails are endless. You can promote seasonal sales, create a fun game to announce product launches, or run holiday campaigns and use these elements to reveal offers.

As the games are inherently fun and inviting, user engagement is often higher, and people are more compelled to take action.

Below is an example of an interactive poll created with AMP for email. Users get to see the response rate in real-time inside the email instead of getting redirected to a web browser.

Another way to boost ROI with interactivity is to promote sales, and discount offers with AMP email widgets like spin the wheel. You can configure the wheel with promotional offers and entice recipients to play with it. This reveals a coupon code in the end, like a surprise.

Way forward

There is no denying that interactive emails hold power to 2X conversions and ROI of your business as this technology is customer-centric and focuses on delivering the best experience inside the inbox. This technology is revolutionizing email marketing from a static medium to a dynamic, and we'll see more brands leveraging these emails to boost engagement and ROI.

Even though the adoption of AMP emails is not diversified, and even email client support is limited, there's no denying this technology's power. Every technology evolves, and AMP will too.

Therefore, it's important to keep an eye on the development of this technology and be prepared to adopt it when the time is right. It could potentially revolutionize how we interact with our customers and users through email.