Do you know the US spends a whopping 3.4 billion dollars on Halloween costumes alone?

Halloween spending

Now imagine how much you can leverage it through your holiday email campaigns. In fact, not only Halloween but, holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Black Friday Cyber Monday, etc. are also a great way of engaging customers and driving conversions.

With 52% of customers checking their email every few hours, well-crafted email campaigns can provide great value to your subscribers and help fuel sales as well. Are you doing enough to engage your customers better this holiday season through your email campaigns? And, whatever holiday email marketing strategies you implement, ask yourself – Is it helping you stand out amidst your competition?

Especially when it’s holiday season and chances of accelerating revenues are very high. This is where including interactivity in your holiday email campaigns can come in handy. Yes, it is one of the top email marketing trends doing the rounds of an email campaign. Interactivity in emails wouldn’t only pleasantly surprise your subscribers but also help in their better engagement.

How to use interactivity in your holiday Email Campaigns to get better engagement

Here’s how you can do it:

1. CSS Animation is the Key

Incorporating CSS animation within your holiday email marketing can be a great way of delighting customers and improving their overall user experience. A CSS animation works towards changing the CSS properties of an animation at regular time intervals. These intervals are specified by certain keyframes which decide the style of the elements and work towards facilitating its animation and transition property. Moreover, CSS animations are not only scalable but are also load in quick time. This makes the overall animation experience smooth for customers and works wonders for their engagement. See how EmailMonks makes use of CSS animation for sending its Christmas wishes.

EmailMonks animated email

To experience the interactivity, click here.

2. Make Way for Videos

One of the best ways of capturing the subscriber’s attention is making use of videos within your email campaign. It gives you the opportunity to deliver diverse content to subscribers within a quick span of time. In fact, interactive emails with videos increase conversion rates by 86%. So, include some relevant, creative, compelling and enticing videos within your holiday email campaigns and see how it takes your interaction with subscribers a level up. Look how Rentalcars.com wishes its customers with a creative video in email:

RentalCars.com video email

3. Say Hello to GIFs

GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format) are a powerful way of engaging customers.  Since it is somewhere between static images and videos, it manages to give subscribers a unique experience by grabbing their attention instantly. It is lightweight, so it does not hamper the loading speed of the email. Try including GIFs in your holiday email campaigns to make it stand out amidst competition and ultimately drive more sales and revenue. 1973’s Christmas email is a great example of using GIFs creatively.

4. Incorporate Add To Calendar Option

Add to calendar option is a great way to enhance your click-through rates and engagement. After all, subscribers will go ahead with your email campaign only when you will give them something enticing enough to click on. So, while designing your holiday email campaign, don’t forget to include an add to calendar option. This way, when you send your customer a holiday specific email, it will give the customer an option to add it to their calendar. This, in turn, will remind the customer not only of the holiday but will also encourage to do holiday shopping with your brand. Simple yet effective – that’s how an option to add to the calendar can help you scale your business in the holiday season.

5. Make Use of Scratch Cards

Scratch cards help increase the curiosity level of subscribers. It is an impeccable tool to increase engagement. The customers have no idea what they are going to get. So, naturally, it will encourage them to click through your email and discover your offer or any kind of promotion that you have included in your holiday campaign. It is a great way of separating yourself from competition and enhancing customer interaction. See how Forever 21 makes use of a cool scratch card for its Black Friday email campaign.

6. Incorporate Countdown Timers

Countdown timers can work a great deal in making holiday email campaign more dynamic.  It doesn’t only captivate a customer’s attention with its motion pictures but, also creates a sense of urgency by incorporating strategies like free shipping deadlines, time-sensitive product promotions with messages like “the stock will be over soon”, “the countdown begins” etc.

So, try these countdown timer emails and see how it increases the visual interest of your customers while engaging them in a better way.  Remember, countdowns are exciting and make people impatient. Hence, make sure you leverage it this festive season and boost your sales.


7. Engage with Gamification

Gamification is considered to be the ‘in thing’ for millennials, but its admirers go much beyond. Hence, leveraging it for your holiday email campaign can be a smart marketing strategy for you. All you need is an interesting game within your email and enhance customer engagement.

Further, you can even include surveys and feedbacks in the form of a game and work towards improving interactivity by giving a world-class gaming experience to your subscribers. Taco Bell makes use of its creative streak with this Christmas gamification email:

8. Give Cinemagraph a Chance

GIFs, videos and images work well for customer engagement but, it is cinemagraph that can make your holiday email campaign top-notch in no time. Since a cinemagraph works towards highlighting a single element of an image while keeping the whole of it static, it works wonders in driving the customer’s attention towards a particularly critical part of the email.

9. Increase Interactivity with Kinetic Emails

Kinetic emails which are created by combining GIFs and key frame animation together takes interactivity to an altogether new level. It is a very impactful way of giving a seamless visual experience to customers within the realms of their inbox. All a customer needs to do is click on a call to action and experience your email content visually just the way Wiredmessenger did it for its Halloween email campaign.

wiredmessenger email

Imagine including one such email in your holiday campaign too. It would certainly increase your engagement and click-through rates by keeping the customers hooked for a long time. In fact, your interactive and creative approach would not only help retain the existing customers but also attract the new ones as well.

Final Thoughts

Interactive emails can help you have an edge over competitors and pave new avenues of success for you. It is a creative and innovative way of engaging customers. So, make use of the above-mentioned interactive elements in your holiday email campaigns to give your customers a beautiful and long-lasting experience while escalating your traffic and conversions.

Author Bio:

by Kevin

Kevin, the Head of Marketing at EmailMonks – one of the fastest growing Email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting beautiful email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free html email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes ‘email marketing’. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing tips and best practices at his email marketing blog.