Include interactive content within your emails

Interactive emails have become more popular in recent years. Interactive content helps generate higher engagement rates from readers and reflects on marketers’ click performance. Interactivity can be about dynamically displaying content, changing the information displayed within the email in real time, or even offering recipients actions they can take without leaving the inbox.

Connecting to this last point, Google has launched AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for emails, an open-source technology for brands to create website-like email marketing campaigns. For example, this technology makes it possible for subscribers to add items to their shopping cart or to book an appointment directly within the email without opening a new tab. But AMP for email has limitations that content marketers should take into consideration, such as having exclusive pre-requisites that need to be fulfilled.

To include interactive elements in your email in order to boost your click conversions, there are more accessible techniques already available, such as: hamburger-like icons (composed of horizontal bars) to show/hide the menu, slideshows to scroll through several images, accordion menus to add lot of content without increasing the email length, videos that make readers want to find out more, animations such as GIFs that catch eyes, countdowns indicating the time remaining before an event, etc. You can also modify the content of a message after it has been sent. For example, if a product is no longer available, it’s possible to say that in the email or to suggest another product instead.

How to include interactive components in your emails 

To leverage email clients that offer interactive features, you can use MJML, a markup language designed to reduce the pain of coding a responsive email:

• MJML offers interactive components such as mj-navbar, mj-accordion and mj-carousel. 

• If the email is opened in an email client which doesn’t support interactions, an attractive fallback option can be displayed.

• Email developers can add custom CSS styles in their MJML templates (including media queries) and even create their own MJML components.