Create unique experiences in a user’s inbox

Though marketers have numerous channels at their disposal to communicate with their customers, email still remains a popular choice. After all, your customers have chosen to receive communication about your company or products, so brands should use this opportunity. However, many of us receive too many marketing emails that all look the same. So how can your brands stand out from the crowd? By using Salesforce’s new ‘interactive email’ feature which enables brands to take their customer interactions to the next level.

What is an interactive email?

Let’s start with the basics, interactive content is anything which requires the user to actively engage and participate with the content to access the full experience. Interactive email incorporates those same features into an email campaign. Due to technical challenges, some companies are still playing catch-up. However, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has released a new feature in April 2020 which enables brands to give their emails this extra edge.

Named one of the top email trends of 2019, interactive emails empower brands to interact with their customers without having to first send them to their company website. Not only is this be a change from traditional email marketing and keep customers interested in your brand emails, but interactive emails can also increase the click-to-open rate by 73%.

Interact without leaving your inbox

Interactive emails can be used for a multitude of reasons and campaigns. A simple example is a rate and review campaign where customers can give their feedback directly in the email. Interactive emails can also be used for various data enrichment campaigns. This enables you to ask your customers various personal questions, such as their birthday for instance, and have them fill in the information directly in their email. This data is then stored in Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and can be easily found by the user.

Personal is better

The information that brands gather via data enrichment campaigns can be used to further customise email content and even facilitate the creation of hyper-personalised customer emails. Hyper-personalisation is where all your data comes together. So an email with product recommendations will not only be based on recent purchase(s), browsing history and items that are usually bought together by other customers but also website behaviour such as how much time a person spends on each page and items they hovered over are incorporated. Also, recommendations will also be based on gender, age, interests, hobbies and preferences, spending habits in addition to geographical data. For example, if you know the location of the customer you can offer them shop specific promotions. This takes website interaction to the inbox of your customers. By combining a user’s website interaction with data which they have willingly shared via email, you can provide them with more relevant content and (hopefully) transform transforming them into return customers.

Stand out from the crowd

The email will remain a crucial communication tool in the near future. By using Salesforce interactive email feature, brands can stand out from the crowd of emails one usually receives. Furthermore, by personalising content and being able to engage with a brand, potential customers are more likely to read, remember and potentially convert.