Interactive Email: Don't Do It Just Because You Can(t)

Hey, I just wanted to give a quick introduction here. I've got, Cyril Gross who works for a company called Mayoris and he's gonna give us a presentation on interactive email and he's gonna do some very interesting things that I've never seen done in email before.

And at the end, we'll probably ask a few questions, but without further ado, here's Cyril.

Hello, thank you and welcome to my short speak about what can be done in email as of twenty twenty.

We are nowadays far beyond the click driving machine that contains some pictures, some text and a link. We are in an age where you can really put entire functionality into one single email.

The interactivity is some a feature that's going to make email cool again. We all know email is not very sexy, it's not very cool stuff to work with, but it really works well as in term of return on investment. And if we do put some interactivity into it, we're going to make it cool again from a user's perspective.

But let me start first what makes an email interactive.

Mark Robbins, one of the first guys to talk about the topic, once said it is an action performed in an email that triggers an action within the same email. So if I click something in the email I won't go to the website but something in the email will change.

I will give you a few examples and then you will immediately know what I mean.

The first one I want to talk about is a fully featured Advent Calendar that runs directly from within the email. Let me show you directly an email client.

You can see I have a nicely made email.

I already here have a slider component carousel where I see some contents running through.

But the cool stuff is here in the center. You see in real time I have an advent calendar with different days that contains different offers, different actions, and I can in the email client switch between the days. If I choose a day that is already over, I cannot participate.

If I choose a current day, I can directly from within the email participate in a prize draw to win a prize. I can type in my data, send it directly from within the email.

The second one I like to show you is a small online shop running directly in the email.

Again, I like to show that out of email client that you see I'm not faking it, but it's real.

I choose the email.

I can see I have a set of products. I actually can add the products directly into the basket that runs in the email and I say order it.

And I can place the order right away.

The third example is something that is connected with the purchasing process and this one is a rather data integrated example.

It is a sticker collecting album that is completely in the email.

We had the issue that we could not save the data, the credit card related data on a web server where the microsite was planned to to be hosted due to security reason. But in the email application, we could have the data for from the credit card transactions. So we decided to create the functionality completely within the email.

Since we had to take it offline again after it was finished for security reason, I can only show you as a video.

You see after I sign up for the campaign, I can see my sticker campaign. After I purchase in those shops paying with my credit card, loyalty credit card, I get the stickers. The stickers are shown in the email in real time and when I have my sticker album full I can send it and participate in a prize draw.

And that is all running completely in the email with the data back end in the email application connecting the purchasing data from that user to the stickers displayed in the email.

The third one is a menu plan newsletter we built for a company that runs restaurants and canteens throughout Switzerland. They run about three hundred canteens all over the country for larger enterprises and these canteens send an email to their visitors. If you sign up you can choose whether you want to receive it daily or weekly with the menu plan of that week.

So today is Wednesday. I see the current day activated in my email in the inbox.

I can see what's on the menu today. I can change to see what's on it for tomorrow or on Friday.

This week Friday is a public holiday here so we don't see a menu. We see the notification that is closed that day.

If I'm a person that works in different locations, for example, a sales representative or a field technician, and I'm on different locations every day, I can as well sign up for the menu for different restaurants and I can in the email switch between the restaurants and because we have the coronavirus crisis here a lot is closed so a lot of company restaurants are closed as well. But here we have another one that offers a menu and when I choose the restaurant the menu in this center part is going to change and show that what's on the table today.

The data for this email comes directly from the menu management ERP system. So the menu you can see here on the screen in the email is entered into the system by the chef of each single restaurant. There are about three hundred in Switzerland.

The data is used for the entire supply chain, for the purchasing of the ingredients to the delivery to the restaurant and for the cooking process.

Plus it is taken into a webcms backend where we create a XML structure with all the menus in it for all the restaurants and this structure is used to display the menu in the email, to display it in the app this restaurant chain provides and on the website of each single restaurant.

So we have a source in the restaurant from the entered by the chef, transferred, used for logistics for supply chain, transferred into a machine readable format we can use on the web, in the email and in the app.

What's the potential in it? You saw already a bit what we can do, but why we do it? I mean the first and upfront reason is to create a better user experience for the email users, not just the dry rather boring list of links and images and texts, but really an interactive presentation of what we have on offer, including we saw it in the shop or in the sticker campaign that you can perform the actions via data in the email.

And this, because it's much easier, it's much more straightforward, has definitely positive impact on conversions. We know that from any study that is done wherever you you name it, but we as well tested some of the emails we did in AB tests. For example, this direct purchasing versions from of emails where you can choose and pay directly in the email, We had uplift of almost fifteen percent in turnover. We did surveys as well in emails. I didn't show that example, but it's something we did as well. NPS survey or multi step surveys.

And there we have we see up to seventy eight percent more conversion compared to a control group that received an email with a button. Please take the survey. Go to the survey page.

It really showed an impressive uplift in sent surveys by the recipients.

And in the end you can save costs. We have done a larger project for a client here in Switzerland to gather appointments for service appointments in buildings for customers. They could directly in the email choose a day and a time and request the meeting.

This prevent with this we substitute a landing page, a development of a landing page, and the client finally said they saved five or six digit sum on a project budget because we moved everything into the email and they didn't have to build the landing pages and maintain the landing pages with all the data interfaces required in the back.

Because often in the email system we have the data already available. For example, if you take Salesforce, you can directly load your data into extension through a manual import, through the automation processes, through data transformation services like MuleSoft or Datorama. You have everything ready in the system, but you usually don't have that, deeply integrated data handling in a web CMS. Or if you want to do it, it requires a lot of interfaces and interfaces API calls near time real time we all know it are, let's say not cheap.

And that's a big potential in the email. And another thing is we can go get around a lot of security issues because the email system already has to fulfill a high level of data security. If you take GDPR, we need to all be ready for it on that level.

It's just another few fields of data in a system that is already made to host sensitive data.

So the question is why should I or when should I do an interactive email? Because that's a question that comes up very often. I start to build a decision tree based on what I want to achieve with my email. So is it an email that should boost my turnover?

If it's a yes, I say yes.

The next question is: Is my audience big enough? If I have five hundred recipients, maybe it won't pay out unless I sell real estate or luxury cars with a high price per item.

But if I sell like iPhone cases, I need several tens of thousands of recipients that I have the chance that it pays off.

So if I have to decide my recipient is not that big, I may be better invest invest my money in growth of my subscriber list.

But if I have a big audience, a few hundred thousand for example, I have to ask myself what email clients are the recipients using? If I'm in a B2B environment where I still have like sixty-seventy percent Outlook, I maybe should think twice whether I want to do interactive email because Outlook we all know is one of the nasty fossil clients that don't really move.

But if I'm in a b to c environment where I have a lot of iPhones, a lot of mobiles, iPads, apple mail, newer Android devices like the current Samsungs where the stuff is supported, then I'm good to go.

Then the next thing is how much turnover can I gain through the interactive email?

Is it, can I just get a few more dollars if I have an uplift of ten percent? I have, low price items and I can just sell another one hundred with one dollar more per one dollar profit per item, it maybe won't pay out. But if I make fifty one hundred thousand turnover per email, I can increase the turnover by ten percent from the email or fifteen percent, then it's most it most likely can pay out.

And because for sure I want to have my development costs covered either directly or over a certain period if I implement it as a as a recurring feature.

Or another question is can I sell save money elsewhere? We saw it before when I can substitute the development of landing pages, I might save enough money that it pays off to put everything into the email.

But if I finally go through the entire tree with yes answers, we are ready to go.

If it's not about a turnover boost, it can be that I want to do a lighthouse campaign for branding, for positioning my company as an innovator, or making something cool or giving something back to my to my audience like we did with Advent Calendar. The Advent Calendar, the reason is not to sell more. The reason is to give back to the to the clients, to our clients. That's why you can win an iPhone. You could could win a trip from Zurich to Helsinki.

Stuff like that is really about giving back. And there it's as well worth to invest something to provide a good user experience.

Then I have to ask myself, is this functionality I have in the inbox sufficient? There are some things we still can't do. We cannot calculate in real time. We cannot randomize certain events in the client. We can randomize it up front. There are some tricks around it, but there are still some limitations compared to a fully featured microsite.

Then they are luckily getting less, but there are still some design limitations from the space I have. I cannot depend on widescreen, I have to focus on more or less six hundred-seven hundred pixels in width, more in a portrait mode.

Can I live with that design limitations I have?

If I can convince my designer that it's still cool, although maybe some shadows and round corners must be a bit streamlined, then we are definitely good to go to build an interactive email to present ourselves as an innovative and user experience focused company.

But what are the challenges?

Nothing comes for free. We all know that.

From a marketeers perspective, for sure it's the costs.

It's not for free. It's more effort to build an interactive email than to just fill in the data into your template and send it out out of your current ESP system.

The acceptance of the email clients, I was touching that topic before already, and the customers itself, because the people out there are not yet used that you can interact with with an email, so you have to teach them how to use the email.

But on the other hand side, if the user experience gets better and you do it the right way, people will get it very quickly.

And then we really have to calculate: do we have a positive return on invest? If yes, then we are definitely good to go.

From an agency's perspective, from a Salesforce age partner, from a marketing agency, we need to ask ourselves: do we have the know how? Do we know what can be done on a conceptual level, on a technical level?

Do we have to know how the experience or do we know where to get to know how? Because you always it's always a make or buy question.

Then how can we convince our client to invest into the topic?

What's the arguments why to do an interactive email? We saw it in decision tree before.

And the third point is do we have the technology available?

Is it available and can we master that technology?

Salesforce just released some interactive features into marketing cloud. Do we know how to use it? Do we know how we can benefit really from what can be done on the platform?

And from a developer's perspective it is a complete paradigm shift in how I structure and how I write my email code.

Everyone remembers those big table dinosaurs we need to write if you if you if you wanna create HTML email.

I mean, those who had have to have to do HTML for email as like a flashback into the browser war times. You you create you you nest tables over tables in each other.

This you have to overcome a bit, and you have to use a lot of CSS and HTML, but you can't use JavaScript.

All the logic, all the functionality you built in the email is done simply by HTML and CSS three using checkboxes, radio buttons, and the CSS selectors for active and checked.

It's a bit a topic to get into it, but if you really get the system out it's cool what you can do.

And then you still have those old fashioned clients. I mentioned Outlook already a few times before. I mean, the good and the bad thing about foresight is that they don't move.

So we really we know quite well how to get around it, And I will touch that topic a bit more in detail just in a minute.

We have the minefield of the email clients. The support for interactivity is getting better. We see currently when we do tests, when we do surveys, for example, or have forms in emails, always measure where the feedback comes from.

Was it sent directly from within the email client?

Was it sent through the fallback version? Or was it sent through the online view of the email? And what we can see is we have always about the two to three percent online view. This is in any email statistics. If you check who clicks where you will see between one and three percent of the people, they always click on this online view button at the top of the email. They are trained on this like a pavlov stock.

But apart from that, we see between fifty five and sixty seven percent of the surveys or forms being submitted coming directly from the email client, showing that between half and two third of all of our recipients can benefit from the increased user experience of the interactive email. And that for me is a big motivation to really push it further because I know I can for a good share of my recipients I can make the email experience better.

So we need to know what works where but we should not postpone innovation because we think we still have ten percent outlook in our subscriber base.

That's the next question. Some people say yeah but if outlook doesn't support it it's not worth it's born dead. I would say no, because it's not rocket science. It's neither from a developer perspective nor from a client or user perspective. It's really difficult. It's sometimes a bit annoying.

You really have to stick into the topic but on the other hand side it's definitely worth and measure if you measure it it pays out because it shows better results.

So then where to start if I want to do an interactive email as a marketeer or developer? The first step is I have to get some inspiration.

There is for example the page reallygoodemails dot com where a few guys collecting good emails they find somewhere out in the market and put it together in a nice list that is really good inspiration if you want to make cool emails.

Then check tutorials.

There are not too many but there are a few tutorials out there how you can start with some basic interactivity in emails.

Trailhead has as well some new trails that shows what you can do with interactivity you can do directly in the Salesforce marketing cloud. Go to Trailhead and check it out.

Then there are other resources pages where you can build some features like the carousel generator from fresh inbox. If you want to add the carousel of a few pictures you can go there, you can create your HTML code, paste it into your email and send it out to your clients.

And the last one, that's the way how I get really deep into the topic is just trial and error. Try it out, fail fast, fail often, but don't give up.

I always tell myself I want to smart out Google and Microsoft to make it running in their clients, even if they limit the support for CSS and HTML in their in their programs.

And that's a good motivation to go further and go the extra mile to make something cool. Then one of the most important topics in my opinion is a decent fallback for all those clients who don't support it out of the box.

I always approach the interactivity as a progressive enhancement into an email. So the basic structure of the email is optimized to be shown perfectly on outlook, on an old gmail or on a not so well known app, wherever it comes from.

Then I use the browser version of the email, the online view version of the email as a fallback.

So in the fallback email version I see everything that I see in the interactive version as well but in a static way. If I click on the interactive feature, the email loads in the browser with that interactive feature already triggered.

In the example of the menu newsletter, if I open it on Wednesday and I want to see the menu for of Thursday, if I click on the Thursday button here in the email, the email opens in the browser with the Thursday already activated.

So I have from a process perspective, I have the same user experience as in the email client that supports interactivity. I just have the loading sequence of the browser in between which is not optimal but still better than just a button in the email saying check out the menu today.

The way how I can make sure that the fallback and the interactive versions are properly displayed on the different clients is that I use the technology that makes the email interactive to hide the fallback version and show the interactive version in the clients that should support it.

With this approach I have inherent reliability that I can see the interactive element only where it is supported.

So interactive email gets some buzz, gets some topic. It was named as a common trend by a few email experts in this year and last year. It actually is around already since like four years. I made my first interactive email late in twenty fifteen, so it's already quite a while ago.

But it always these innovation topics need a bit time to really get off ground.

But there are things coming. One thing is that you will see interactive features integrated into the ESP systems like Salesforce Marketing Cloud that just recently released some first interactivity interactive elements that you can place in your emails.

Then another big topic that start pick up speed now is AMP for email released by Google.

That allows you to bring all the interactivity into the Gmail platforms and Microsoft with Outlook app and Outlook dot com Webmail client will support it as well.

So you can as well you can send interactive emails as well on those clients.

And last but not least there are a few API based systems where you can create your interactive email HTML code.

We at Myoris are currently working on a platform like this. We have it already running in a beta version.

You create a JSON string that configures what you want to do, what you want to show in the email, send it through the API, and you receive send ready HTML code, which you can just place into your email system and send out.

We're going to launch that in the next few weeks with some first public features available.

That's all for me now.

Just one last thing: you can access this presentation from mayors dot com slash xforce2020 and on this last slide if you click on this email icon on the top right you can enter your first name, your last name, your email address and send the presentation directly to your inbox, because this presentation you just saw is an interactive email itself. Thank you for watching.

That's a very interesting presentation and it's interesting technology.

I have a couple questions. First off, I'm gonna sign up and get that email in my inbox and take a look at it.

Where the technology stands right now, it looks to me like a developer is really needed to do some of these very more complex interactive emails like that menu one that you showed us. Do you think that in addition to whatever Salesforce is using and what your company is using, how far out do you think is it for what you see is what you get type editing client that anybody with a little bit of design ability or has done HTML would be able to create interactive emails. You think that's coming soon or do you think that they're just going to be complex for a while?

We are at the brink of these kind of features getting commoditized like that you have the the widgets to create certain interactivity is like the carousel is a sort of a no brainer nowadays. The forms that Salesforce gonna Salesforce recently launched, That's definitely the the features you will see out of the box in email systems.

Then on the on the other hand side, the this kind of menu newsletter that requires such a specific data binding and development that's something I guess you hardly will see as a pre created functionality because it all relies on what restaurants you have subscribed for, you are subscribed for, is there data available and such.

But on the other hand side the micro shop in the email that's something we are currently working on fully fully automize it in a way that you get a visit, we get it as you get an editor where you can choose a product number, type the price, type the discount and then reload all the rest from a Google shopping feed, which is structured XML feed. And this kind of use cases we will definitely see integrated in email systems. It's going to be far too expensive and far too much in a niche to really break out.

Now that Gmail and Outlook are going to AMP, are you expecting that minefield you showed will have more green on it, that you can support more things if you use AMP in those clients?

Yeah, for sure. I mean the with AMP and the interactivity as well I showed it here, can we will be able to cover something between seventy sixty five to eighty, maybe ninety percent. Outlook will not support it in the desktop app, at least Microsoft didn't announce that yet, but on the Webmail client and the mobile apps. The disadvantage of AMP is that in one first your ESP system need to be able to send out AMP. It's a bit trickier to create an AMP version and send it out, and the second is you need you need to get the verification from Google that you are eligible to send AMP, which can be sort of a hassle. That's current disadvantage of AMP, but together with what we are doing that is supported on all the Apple platform and some Androids, you can reach up to eighty percent plus of your audience.

So Google has to wait list you to send AMP to Gmail?

You need to first create a example mail in AMP, send it to them for verification and they will see whether you are a good sender that regularly sends emails to your clients and don't have too much spam compliance and those stuff. And if Google says, yeah, yes, it's okay, you're you're you're a good guy, and the email you showed us is good, then they will allow you to send AMP.

Maybe we should just define AMP briefly for people who've never heard of it.

AMP is an effort of Google, originally comes from the mobile web to make mobile pages faster in terms of loading and in terms of usability.

It's a subset, it's a set of components written in JavaScript and HTML that allows you to to transfer a reduced amount of HTML and data and like separate data and presentation up to certain point. That was created for the mobile web world, mainly on Android.

Now they try to move it into the email world with a subset of the of the components you have in the for mobile apps.

But still you can do a lot of things like doodle the the appointment scheduling service has have put their entire calendar into it. It offers quite a wide range. I recently made a five star rating with form fields, in AMP. Works pretty straightforward.

Good. Well, thanks again for the presentation. It was very interesting, and thanks for introducing us to the world of interactive email.

We appreciate your time, and we look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak here and it was really a pleasure to present the topic.

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