Email inboxes are more crowded than ever before. At 1.47 million emails sent per month, US companies send more emails than the global average of 1.38 million, according to MarketingLand. This results in a lot of messages hitting subscribers’ inboxes.
Although it’s become tough to gain attention via email, there are ways to stand apart. By using interactive content, you can delight your readers, subsequently improving email engagement.
Interactive content is a great way to engage subscribers and can encourage them to share more information with you. In fact, 81% of content marketers believe that interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static content, according to Content Marketing Institute.
There’s no doubt– interactive email campaigns and those that promote interactive content can help you gain information about subscribers, delight your audience, and ultimately improve engagement metrics and ROI.
Today, we’re sharing 5 easy ways to use interactive content to drive email engagement.
1. Surprise and delight your subscribers
Many emails that your subscribers receive are pretty run-of-the-mill- they’re unlikely to pique much interest. However, interactivity gives you the opportunity to surprise and delight your readers with something new.
If you want to delight your subscribers, include interactive experiences such as video, memes, and GIFs within your messages. Using creativity in your emails can help make your audience love you, and when your audience loves you, they’re much more likely to open your emails and click through to your website.
You can adopt a less formal, more conversational tone with these kinds of emails as well, making your audience see your brand as more human and approachable, which in turn, will make them want to connect with you.
You can see the interactive campaign by checking out this link. (If you’re in Chrome or Safari, you’ll see the interactive version. In Firefox, you’ll see the fallback version).
2. Use psychology to boost results
Interactive content works because of powerful psychological triggers. Consumers are driven to interact by core psychological components such as curiosity or the brain’s ability to respond to operant conditioning.
Understanding and leveraging these key psychological principles will help you build the best possible interactive campaigns, and will entice recipients to engage with your brand.
Once you understand the motivation behind why people click, read, and share, it becomes easier to integrate those successful elements.
3. Combine interactive experiences with personalization efforts
In order to create personalized experiences, you need information about your subscribers. You need to know their preferences, interests, location, gender, age, and other attributes in order to send compelling campaigns.
Interactive experiences provide the perfect platform for gaining information about your subscribers– and you can use interactivity to offer insights in exchange.
For example, Paradigm Life has a Financial Literacy Quiz to help their audience understand their financial knowledge. If Paradigm Life encourages subscribers to take this quiz via email, subscribers will be intrigued by the offer. When they visit the calculator, they’ll be prompted to enter information that Paradigm Life can then use to segment and personalize their future marketing efforts.
4. Promote interactive campaigns that deliver what subscribers want
Consider what your subscribers want to know. Are they wondering which newsletters to subscribe to from a given publisher? Are they worried that they can’t afford a home where they live? What’s the information that they want to know that you can provide?
If you’re able to provide subscribers with the information they want, through an interactive experience, then they’ll be more likely to click-through your email campaigns.
For example, The New York Times published Is It Better to Rent or Buy, an interactive experience that helps people understand their best options for housing. The publisher was able to provide useful information to a subscriber– they’ll be happy to click-through to a personalized experience such as this one.
Ask yourself: How can your business solve a potential customer’s problem and drive conversions? When you problem solve for your customers, they are almost compelled to open your emails, click through, and read your content.
5. Incorporate fun – with no explicit sales goal
It’s tempting to make sure that every email you send has an explicit sales goal, but emails are also an important aspect of building brand awareness and encouraging customer loyalty. When it comes to improving engagement, sheer entertainment may be the way to go.
Try sending out something entertaining for a holiday or making your monthly newsletter interactive. Some of the highest CTRs (click-through rate) you’ll ever get are from emails that don’t have much to do with a promotion or your business but still redirect to your website or other content within the email. For example, table tr td’s simply sent out interactive email bubblewrap.
Wrap up
If you’re looking to increase email engagement, look no further than interactive content. Equipped with these 5 tips, you’re sure to find creative ways to drive further results from your email marketing.