• by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, February 21, 2019

Jeroen Soethout, Senior Campaign Developer at Holland’s 100%EMAIL agency, discussed three things to take into account when using interactive email. He spoke Thursday at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit Europe on “A Brief History of Interactive Email.”

• If you are going to use interactive elements in your email, check to see if your recipients are using email charts that support interactivity.

• If you have an audience that is mainly B2C, you have the biggest chance of people seeing your interactive elements.

• Don’t be scared to try out those features and always test with a static version as a control group.

Interactive email — described by Soethout as the “provocation of a reaction, through animation, personalization and/or video —became possible after smartphones became ubiquitous.

Among the kinds of interactive email, he mentioned are animation, video, web experience, tabs, the parallax effect, a hamburger menu, a carrousel, Tinder type email, shopping in email, and gamification.

Soethout suggested using forms, polls, countdowns, live text, and/or personal images in emails. An example he gave was merging external content with your images, e.g., a weather forecast.

“Not all clients can handle interactive email,” he said. “So you have to choose to create a fallback scenario, with a ‘static alternative’ or choose to make the element completely invisible.”

Interactive emails are read more often, he said, are remembered better, are shared more often and often deliver twice as much conversion.