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By Susan Gunelius
For cannabis brands, email marketing is essential, but it’s hard to stand out in the inbox when so many other B2C and B2B cannabis companies are investing large amounts of time, resources, and money into email marketing. Today, the best way to get noticed in the inbox for the right reasons is by delivering meaningful content that recipients actually want. But that’s not the only way.
You can also add interactive elements to your email marketing messages to boost engagement with your content. Increased engagement not only helps improve conversions, but it also helps keep your brand top-of-mind among recipients who may not be ready to buy immediately.
Think of it this way – your email marketing messages shouldn’t just be promotional or few people will want to stay on your list. Instead, the best email marketers focus on sending messages that are educational, engaging, and/or entertaining (in addition to timely promotional messages). With interactive elements in your messages, you can do all three – educate, engage, and entertain.
With that in mind, following are five ways you can add interactivity to your email marketing campaigns to help you reach your goals across the marketing funnel by generating more viable leads, effectively nurturing leads through the buyer journey, and ultimately, converting leads into sales. In fact, interactive elements can even help you identify people who are not your target audience, so you can remove them from your list and protect your future email deliverability.
1. Interactive Surveys
You can add interactive surveys and polls in your email marketing campaigns in order to gather market research data or just for fun. Whether you’re trying to get feedback about what type of product your customer should offer to customers next or which flower image recipients like more, you can use surveys to engage and entertain.
Similarly, you can use quizzes to educate your audience. Interactive quizzes in email marketing messages can be standalone or they could be integrated with or related to other educational material or courses your company offers.
2. Animated GIFS
Animated GIFs are very effective when it comes to catching a recipient’s attention so they don’t miss a specific part of your email marketing message. GIFs can be fun, entertaining, and even educational, so don’t be afraid to get creative!
Do keep in mind that animated GIF file sizes can be very large, so it’s important that you save the GIF to the smallest size possible. If the HTML file size of your message gets too big, many email service providers (like Google, Outlook, and so on) will send it to spam, and you don’t want that to happen.
3. Ratings and Reviews
Have you ever received an email that asks you to rate the sender by clicking on one to five stars or by clicking a smiley or frowning face? You’re being asked to click on interactive elements.
Many companies use interactive rating and review elements to gather data for their net performer score (NPS), but you can use them for anything you want. Recipients can instantly rate your service, a product, a blog post, and so on without leaving the email message, so it’s a very effective way to gather feedback.
4. Scratch Offs or Discounts Reveals
You can use image rollover effects to provide a variety of experiences in your email marketing campaigns. For example, you can show recipients different views of your product or a product image and a list of features. It’s a great way to provide more information in a small space, so recipients don’t have to scroll too far to find what matters to them.
Image rollover effects can also be used to include discount reveals (e.g., scratch offs) directly within your email message. It’s hard for people to resist finding out what their discount could be, so this tactic can be very effective to increase conversions.
5. Image Carousels
Images are extremely popular these days, so adding interactive image carousels to email marketing messages makes sense. It’s an excellent way to share multiple images in a small space while giving recipients control of their experience with your content.
It’s also a great way to take recipients on a journey, such as sharing steps in a technique related to your products or services. Another example is an image carousel of a product unboxing, an in-store event, and so on. Just make sure the carousel is engaging, entertaining, and/or educational, and it’s appropriate for your brand as well as the recipient audience.
Key Takeaways about Interactive Content in Email Marketing Campaigns
Research from Dyspatch shows 60% of email recipients are likely to engage with an interactive email and 50% want to interact with content inside the emails they receive, but most companies aren’t using interactive content in their email marketing campaigns yet. This is a missed opportunity.
While it’s true that AMP for email, which allows emails to include interactive content, hasn’t been around for long and interactive campaigns can be challenging to create, the opportunity to stand out in the inbox with interactive content is significant. In the cannabis industry, where competition can be fierce, it’s definitely worth considering interactive content as part of your brand’s email marketing plan in the future.
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