How Interactive Content Can Level-Up Your Email Campaigns

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Key takeaways

• Interactive content (images, videos, carousels, menus, tabs, polls) makes emails more engaging and memorable.
• Think of an email as a mini website or “sub‑site” when planning interactive features.
• Use carousels, hover effects, interactive menus and tabs to showcase products and organise content without lengthening the email.
• Tabs increase usable space but don’t overload them. Too many tabs or too much content can overwhelm readers.

Introduction

When it comes to email marketing campaigns, a lot of people have the wrong idea. I think there’s a common misconception that email marketing must be a staid, boring strategy that doesn’t manage to incorporate any kind of meaningful or innovative content into its delivery. As those already using email marketing already know, however, this is patently false. In fact, one of the beautiful things about email marketing is just how customizable it is. Would you like to include images? Links? Audio? Video? The world of email marketing is extensive, and limited only by your imagination and the amount of effort you’re willing to expend.

One of more exciting things that you can do with email marketing is include interactive content in the campaign. Interactive content can play a big role in improving the effectivity of email marketing campaigns, and can really take your campaign from “good” to “amazing”. Let’s take a look at interactive content and why you should consider including it in order to create better, more dynamic campaigns.

Why interactive content?

As the name implies, interactive content is content that your subscribers can interact with – content that engages them and encourages them to stick around a little bit rather than quickly clicking out of your email. This, in turn, means that they will have more time to absorb your message and perhaps take advantage of your calls to actions. Even better, however, is that readers are more likely to remember content paired with interactive content. It becomes a memorable experience rather than just another email they opened and then sent to the trash.

Can I really incorporate interactive content into my emails?

You really can! Take a moment and think about your emails as an extension of your website – a sub site, if you will. When thinking about your email sub site, what kinds of content would you like to see in it? What kind of content would you include if it was your main website? You can include a surprising amount of interactive content into your emails. These include:

• Animated GIFs
• Videos
• Scratch and Flips
• Menus
• Accordions

Interactive content makes your emails seem more interesting and engaging to readers. Let’s take a look at some more specific examples of interactive content you might consider putting into your emails.

A Product Image Carousel

Looking for inspiration about how to spice up your emails with interactive content? Consider adding an image carousel! You can bring your readers’ attention firmly to your products while also engaging them and perhaps convincing them to stick around and give the email a read. You can even include a mouse over effect that offers more information about the images should the reader hover on them.

Interactive Menus and Navigation Bars

Interactive menus are menus that change as you click on them or hover your mouse over them. A single title might expand into a menu on mouse over, for example, which is both visually interesting as well as practical. That’s because this kind of menu doesn’t take up a lot of space in your emails, and in fact can help you create a more refined and “minimalist” layout. They also tend to render particularly well in mobile, which will help keep the users on their phones or tablets engaged.

Tabs

Who doesn’t love tabs? Just like the menus described above, including tabs in your email is a great way to help keep things organized and tidy without leaving out the important information you want your subscribers to know. Using tabs can effectively increase the usable space in your emails by quite a bit, and even enable you to write about a number of different themes that would otherwise demand their own emails. As a word of caution, however, you want to avoid using too many tabs and cramming too much information into the email – doing either of these things could overwhelm users rather than attract their attention and keep them engaged.

Polls

Polls have long been a way for marketers to capture the interest of consumers. You can include an interactive poll directly in your email! This will engage your readers and encourage them to voice their opinion as well as seek out that of others. It’s a classic engagement strategy!As you can see, there are a lot of options when it comes to using interactive content in your email marketing campaigns. Don’t wait – jump on this email trend and see how it can improve your reader engagement!

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