Thursday, November 5, 2015

How To Use Interactive Menus in E-mails to Boost Engagement and Sales

 

Image courtesy of (Stuart Miles)/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Social media may be the new go-to online marketing strategy to gain website traffic, but it can’t be denied that e-mails are, and will continue to, driving sales. In fact, according to a recent online survey, it was concluded that 77 percent of consumers consider e-mail to be one of the most preferred mediums to receive permission-based marketing communications.

It’s good if you’re already using or have decided to use e-mail as the medium to get your brand message to your target audience, but remember that with the rapidly changing digital world, marketers are facing challenges to engage not-so-patient customers. And so, you may not be able to drive traffic, if you’re using the same old-fashioned e-mail templates.

You must adopt innovative e-mail marketing techniques to present your brand as a unique identity in a crowded inbox. Put simply, customers’ inboxes are filled with e-mails already. To ensure they’ll read your mail, it is imperative to provide an exceptional user experience (UX) to your e-mail recipients. And, one great way to do so requires using “interactive menus in e-mail.”

Read on to understand the role that interactive menus play in making e-mail marketing a successful venture.


What Do We Mean By Interactive Menus in E-mails?
With so many companies sending information via e-mail, to compete, you need to add elements that can make your e-mails easily accessible and easy-to-read. For instance, adding navigation in e-mails will help users navigate the message easily and, most importantly, will help them access the most important parts of the e-mail. This technique supplies plenty of information without distracting users because it enables recipients to skim through the text.

Apart from incorporating interactive navigation and menus, there are a few other interactive possibilities you can consider adding in your e-mails, such as:
  • Image gallery;
  • Accordion and tabs;
  • Flip effects.

What Benefits You Get By Sending out E-mails Containing Menus?
There are four major benefits of sending e-mails with interactive menus:


1. Helps Improve UI and UX
The biggest advantage of interactive menus is that it helps improve the user interface (UI), as well as, user experience (UX).

Businesses or companies, when running an e-mail campaign, usually let users take an action on the landing page – that they’re redirected to via email. But, by using the menus in your e-mail, you can navigate to important areas of your site seamlessly. That’s because e-mails with menus acts as “mailable microsites” that can be accessed within the e-mail itself.


2. Useful for Diverse Business Verticals
Another benefit of adding interactive menus in e-mails is that it helps entice targeted users belonging to diverse business verticals.

For example, consider the case when a media company needs to share truckloads of information with users. Of course, it will require menus to let users decide what kind of information they would like to view. Even businesses associated with e-retail find having e-mails with menus useful because they can share everything about their business and still can retain the recipient’s attention.


3. Triggers Immediate Action, and Increase Conversion
Navigation menus help the reader to act quickly, thereby boosting conversion. Wondering how? Well, navigation and menus allow e-mail recipients to check several things within the e-mail, without flipping many pages. For instance, users can browse through the company’s information, or products, etc., make the choice and can convert without leaving the inbox.


4. Make Reading E-mails “On the Fly” a Breeze
Let’s say, you run a company that is involved in selling hundreds of thousands of products, or are running a company (for example a news/media company) that requires sharing lots of information with customers. Needless to say, your e-mail recipients – who often read messages on the fly – won’t like reading a e-mail having plenty of data, especially when you’re targeting impatient viewers.
In that case, interactive drop-down menus would prove quite useful. Using drop-down menus will help hide less important content (or even a header) from users. And thus, users will get the ability to decide exactly what sort of information they want to consume.


Key Considerations on How to Use Interactive Menus in E-mails
Here are a few key considerations to take into account to use interactive menus in the most effective and efficient manner possible:
  • Make sure you are using responsive navigation bars with relevant content that is critical for your business. Also, focus on the placement of the content.
  • Avoid adding too many menu categories, doing so will make the e-mail cluttered and difficult to understand.
  • Use dynamic, interactive menus that automatically change in the e-mail whenever the menu in your website is modified.
  • Focus on adding padding around the text used in e-mail. Choose the font type and size carefully to achieve better typography.
  • Don’t forget to test your e-mail code. Check if it is compatible with major browsers and platforms .

As e-mail marketing is becoming more and more challenging, using strategies such as interactive menus will help keep recipients engaged with your brand.

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