The Year of Interactive Email

While email has been around for a while, it can still be very hard to get right, mostly for the lack of standardization among email clients. However, this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fun either. Can you think of a better way to engage your readers than giving them the option to interact with your email rather than leaving the inbox? That’s what TicketMaster experimented with its Music Video Award email, giving the possibility for their readers to vote straight from the email for their favorite artist. The results were astonishing, with an open rate exceeding the usual rate by more than 180%.

Dive into interactivity

At Mailjet, we’re convinced that 2017 will be the year of interactive email. That’s an idea we share with the MJML team and that’s why they released their first interactive component, which enables you to display an image gallery in an email with only a few lines of code. Readers will be able to browse between images if their email clients enable it (like on Apple Mail, Gmail or Yahoo, among others). If not, decent fallbacks are applied as they’ll have the experience they’re used to, seeing only the first image (like on Outlook.com).

In additions to polls and carousels, here are a few other interactive components that could wow your subscribers’ minds.

Customization of a product

This one is a real technical challenge, but the result is impressive. Burberry sent their subscribers an email where they were able to customize a scarf, giving them the ability to choose the color. The scarf also had the initials of the recipient, which, in addition to mastering responsive email coding, requires the use of server-side scripts to change the initials on the image for each subscriber.

Here is a sneak peek of what the email looked like (you can even have a play too ?):

Image courtesy of FreshInbox.

The drawback is that this email is interactive only on webkit based email clients, other email clients will display a static version.

Accordions

Using accordions in email will enable you to put a lot of content in your email without dramatically increasing the length, which is pretty useful, especially for mobile. For example, you might want to display various products in a retail email or the answers to a few common questions.

Here’s an Email Monks example, showcasing what such an email might look like:

Shopping within the email

Email is one of the biggest channels for ecommerce, as it can capture the attention and engage your subscribers. So, why not give them the opportunity to shop from your email, itself. Our friends at Rebelmail (with whom we partnered for their big API launch), are the experts at creating emails like this. They’ll enable you to create emails where your readers can actually pick a product, select a size and when they’re ready to complete the purchase, they’ll be redirected to your site’s checkout page. Rebelmail also provides you with the analytics you need around the interactions that happened inside the email.

Stay tuned for more

We hope you found some inspiration for your own interactive emails. We’re releasing more and more interactive components in MJML that will make things easier, follow the team on Twitter to keep up to date. You can also get involved on Github and chat with the MJML community on Slack.