Tag: Interactive email

Email Marketing

Can I share a secret?

3 minute read
Mel Jewell Mel Jewell

Question:

How do you go about building and sustaining your customer base in the crowded world of email marketing?

Answer:

Why not let your customers do some of the work for you?

This is where multichannel marketing comes in to play. You can reach your untapped potential through other channels than email, such as your own website or social media to encourage new signups to your brand.

But is there a missed avenue to gain even more signups? Your best advocates may turn out to be your own users – if you’ve created engaging, exciting content then why wouldn’t they want to shout about it? Make it easy for them.

Here’s how we do it…

Share on social media

Through us you have the option to share the whole email on social media, or to specify a URL instead for shareworthy articles. Built in to our platform are direct links to open new posts for Facebook, Google+, Twitter (X), LinkedIn or you can select “Generic” and build a link to any social media platform of your choosing.

From a coding perspective it is a doddle, it’s just adding a link tag into your template. If you want to share the whole email:

<a href="#" social-network="facebook">Share this email on Facebook</a>

<a href="#" social-network="linkedin">Share this email on LinkedIn</a>

Then a click on this links will simply set up the post ready to send:

Share to Facebook Post

Share to LinkedIn Post

Or to set the post copy as a URL instead of the email image:

<a href="#" social-network="facebook" social-url=" https://www.theemailfactory.com/the_biz/how-ethical-are-your-emails/”>Share this email on Facebook</a>

For Twitter…excuse me X…you know the one I mean, you have the option to pre-write the tweet:

<a href="#" social-network="twitter" social-tweet="Check out this article: https://www.theemailfactory.com/the_biz/how-ethical-are-your-emails/”>Tweet this link</a>

Share on Twitter Post

Share by email

You might also encourage your users to share directly to their friends and family, people they would likely only target if they knew they already had an interest:

<a href="#" social-network="sendtofriend">Click here</a> to share this email with a friend.

This is slightly more involved as your user will have to fill out a few details, but if you’ve got them excited enough to share, that shouldn’t stop them!

Shsre with a Friend Form

Once they’ve filled out the form, their lucky chosen recipient will receive an email with the message from their friend saying why they are receiving this email with just a sneak preview of what the email is and a link to the full thing:

Email Header

Then reassurance that they have not been added against their will to any mailing list and that their data privacy remains well and truly intact:

Email footer

By making it as easy as possible for your users to spread the word and share your content amongst themselves, it’s up to you to give them a reason. This should inspire you to create innovative, eye-catching emails with a great message that might just motivate your users to share, especially if all they have to do is click a link.

Here’s some ideas on adding interactivity to your emails which could be a good place to start! Not only will well designed and captivating emails help sustain your current base and stave off lethargy and loss of engagement, it might also help it grow if word starts getting around.

Interactive email

Four useful ideas for interactive email

2 minute read
Adrian Young Adrian Young

You can do all sorts of things with the checkbox hack. But not all of them are useful. For the unfamiliar, the checkbox hack is a clever CSS trick that makes it possible to build interactive emails.

All email content must be useful to the customer, and interactive content is no exception. So, forget about those gimmicky drop-down nav menus product carousels. Let’s aim instead for the kind of interactivity that enriches our emails.

1. Rotatable products

It’s common on a retail websites to be able to view products from multiple angles. But in email there’s usually only a single, static product shot. It doesn’t need to be that way.

By assigning animation triggers to left and right arrows on either side of an image, you can let the user rotate a product right there in the email. Drop in a few frames of animation for each of the quarterly rotations and you can achieve an effective illusion of movement.

For our demo, I grabbed a mug from the kitchen. But just imagine this technique used for cars or any other product where every angle matters.

2. Colour selector

On the subject of cars – they tend to come in a variety of colours. So too do clothes, phones, items of furniture, toasters… and so on. You can guess where this is going.

Place some colour swatches next to the product image and let the user browse all colours before committing to a website visit. This isn’t just a cosmetic effect. Whilst swapping out the image, you can also swap the link, thus directing the customer straight to their chosen colour variation on your web page.

3. Multiple choice quiz

But maybe your customer isn’t so sure about what they want. Why not guide them? A multiple-choice quiz is the perfect way to present the customer with a result based on their personal interests… and you don’t even need any prior data. In fact, you can even use it to start building up a customer profile by tracking the links. How good is that?

Our demo uses a topic close to my heart: dogs. There are 18 possible combinations of answers, each leading to a specific breed of dog. This technique could of course be used for any topic under the sun. Perfect holiday destination, perfect perfume, perfect anything-you-like.

4. Randomiser

Oh, about those holiday destinations – sometimes it’s fun just to spin the globe and discover somewhere completely new. Well, you can do that in email too. Engage your customer’s curiosity with randomisation.

Here’s how it works: you can secretly cycle a series of identical-looking buttons. The random factor is time – i.e. when the user clicks the button. Dress that up in some fancy animation and you’ve created an engaging piece of content based on the element of surprise.

We’ve chosen holiday destinations for our demo, but as always you could pick any topic you like. The possibilities are endless.

What else can you think of?

Done right, interactive content can really bring an email to life. With a bit of imagination, the medium of email can be transformed into something incredible. (Just don’t forget that fallback content for non-compatible email apps!)