Your customers’ inbox is highly competitive ground. According to Earthweb, consumers receive over 100 emails per day. Email marketers who adjust their strategy to fit consumer needs are actually seeing higher open and engagement rates. According to recent statistics from Hubspot, 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
What are these marketers doing to stay ahead? They’re utilizing segmenting, testing, targeting, and adjusting their strategy to be mobile-focused. Smartphone users prefer to receive brand communications via email.
What makes an email gamified?
With a growing preference for mobile email layouts, high competition, and customers having less attention to give to brands, more brands are making their emails interactive. Also known as email marketing gamification, interactive email marketing is one of the hottest trending email marketing strategies. An interactive marketing email “gamifies” a usually “non-gaming” task. For a task to be gamified, it must follow these three principles: engagement, award, and competition.
Occasion email marketing, or sending a special email to your mailing list with an incentive or offer tied to a holiday or themed day, is an example of gamified email marketing as it turns a normal day (non-gamified task) into an occasion, therefore gamifying it. Similarly, customer loyalty programs count as interactive email marketing. This strategy gamifies your customer’s normal spending by giving them an incentive to purchase more to reach certain goals and rewards.
Here’s a simple example of interactive email marketing that also utilizes social media from Hustler Marketing. This children’s clothing brand used a graphic from their Instagram story that is already gamified. It shows two clothing options, and using an Instagram Story Poll feature, they asked their audience to vote on which item they prefer. To continue this game on their email list, they simply converted that story to an email and hyperlinked the piece of clothing over where Instagram users would have tapped to choose which option they liked best. This made their email interactive and took buyers right to the link to purchase the item.
Why choose gamified emails?
Why should you implement gamified emails in your strategy? This strategy will make your customers feel satisfied not only with your product but also themselves. By engaging them, you’ve essentially had them “work” to earn a reward.
This strategy also has many unexpected benefits. It can increase user engagement which can be translated into better click rates, it can help you gather information about your customers, it can be a great option to educate your customers about your products or brand, and more.
Want to seriously step up your email marketing game? Contact us!
Sources:
https://nethunt.com/blog/email-marketing-trends/
https://www.hustlermarketing.com/blog/gamification-in-email-marketing-5-simple-interactive-emails-to-boost-engagement/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats
https://earthweb.com/how-many-emails-does-the-average-person-receive-per-day/
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