Email marketing has transformed into a highly interactive experience in recent years. It enables your recipients to engage with your brand in ways that typical, nonresponsive, nonmoving emails do not. Increased click-throughs, increased engagement, and increased rapport with your recipients and audience are all laid out before you when utilizing these features. Yet, when it comes to email deliverability, one could get in trouble using such interactive features to enhance user experience. Knowing where the pitfalls lie to preserve sender reputation is crucial to avoiding an inbox disaster. Thus, when it comes to using elements of interactivity in email marketing, there are certain best practices to follow for deliverability purposes.

Why Interactive Elements are Valuable in Email Marketing

The inclusion of polls, carousels, buttons, and video allows readers to engage with the email content without leaving the email itself. It creates a more individualized experience and inspires people to act, whether filling out a survey, viewing a product video, or engaging with a trivia question. Use an Email Template Checker to ensure these interactive elements render correctly across all devices and email clients. They take relevance to the next level because of the engaged experience with your email content; they improve user engagement and boost click-through rates.

Moreover, interactive elements gamify the experience, rendering an email more dynamic and customized to one’s history and preferences, so a more meaningful interaction with the company/creator is possible. However, despite their advantages for user experience, interactive elements can jeopardize deliverability when done incorrectly.

Understanding Deliverability Concerns with Interactive Elements

In addition, email interactivity raises concerns about deliverability. For example, many spam filters are designed to detect certain elements that provide unapproved security. If you’re attempting to use any interactive features especially those via embedded scripts, forms, and even third-party widgets your email might be deemed spam. These filters identify security concerns created by extensions they do not recognize, meaning you must understand how employing these cutting-edge features can automatically send your message straight to spam and decrease the success of your campaign.

These advanced features will not be displayed across email clients. Many of these advanced features are available, but not every email client supports them, and some do not display them correctly (Outlook). When this happens, recipients get broken, invisible emails instead of engaging in the campaign. This can further damage deliverability ratings and sender reputation.

Keep It Simple: Avoid Overcomplicating Interactive Features

Yet, while it’s easy to overstuff your emails with interactivity, less is more. The more complex your solutions, the easier it is for your emails to end up in the spam folder and your ultimate aim is to create a happy medium between interactivity and what it was created for. Thus, stick to one or two interactive components that preserve the email’s purpose.

For instance, a clear CTA is an interactive element that would encourage engagement without bombarding a user with too much in one area. An image carousel is another option that allows people to view different offerings without creating a busy email. Regardless of your options, ensure they’re straightforward for users to employ. If someone wants to avoid interacting with the email, give them an easy opportunity to do so.

Test for Compatibility Across Different Email Clients

Not all email clients render interactive capability, and assessing the leading email solutions for support can enhance recipient experience and keep deliverability rates up. Therefore, it’s important to assess the interactive email in the first place across the board Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple Mail, etc. to ensure it will go through.

Then, if an email client does not support the interactive capability, there should be a static image/message or a hyperlink to an external destination landing page. This ensures that if nothing generates for the recipient, at least they can get something instead of reporting the email as spam for having no content.

Use Email Authentication to Boost Trust

Email authentication is one way to raise your email deliverability rates and help ensure that your marketing messages always reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Email authentication means creating a series of technical records and settings that make you look like a legitimate sender while simultaneously protecting your reputation and giving you the best chance at a successful deliverability rate.

The three key records that comprise email authentication are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) allows receiving mail servers to check whether your email originated from one of the servers permitted to use your domain. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) provides advanced cryptographic signatures to ensure that an email is not altered while in transit. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) extends authentication by using SPF and DKIM in alignment to provide receiving mail servers with specific instructions on what to do if an email fails authentication.

Setting up these three records SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain properly means your email is less likely to be sent to a spam folder or rejected in the first place. When an incoming email server sees that you have standards for authentication, it deems your email more reputable and more likely to find its way into your subscribers’ primary inbox.

In addition, as email becomes more dynamic and interactive, authentication becomes increasingly valuable. Should you be sending an email with a form inside, for example, dynamic content within the body of the email, image galleries with images that can be clicked through, or any other component designed to interact with or engage subscribers, such elements may attract even more scrutiny from an Email Service Provider (ESP). The need for interaction often needs a much higher trust level from an ESP, for instance, since dynamic content can be used maliciously. 

Therefore, the better the authentication of your email, the more ESPs and email clients will believe it and properly deliver it when it features high-engagement opportunities.
Furthermore, sender reputation should be monitored in an effort to maintain effective email deliverability. Sender reputation is an overview of your sending domain and IP addresses as ESPs view it. Thus, by tracking the reputation of your domain, bounce rates, open and click rates, and unsubscribe and spam complaint rates, any red flags or sudden fluctuations are noticed right away. In addition, authentication records should be monitored more than just on holidays. Any time adjustments are made to your email platform, email providers, and any tertiary services used, audit authentication records for correctness and compliance.

The Importance of Focusing on User Experience

Email usability for email marketing relies on the experience. For example, adding interactive elements is a great way to enhance the experience, but it also needs to come with usability ease. If your subscribers struggle with these features, such as if they are too complex or load too slowly, you may annoy your users and foster greater disinterest. So ensure these features are lightweight and load quickly to prevent frustration among subscribers.

In addition, think about mobile usability. Many of your subscribers check their email on the go, and interactive elements that don’t load or can’t be utilized on various screen sizes may be an issue. Email deliverability is already a challenge with responsiveness. Don’t make it worse with non-mobile usable options.

Monitor and Analyze Performance to Adjust Strategies

It’s also essential to assess your interactive email campaigns after deployment. Watch your open rates, clicks, and bounce rates to gauge how well the interactive elements are performing. Be on the lookout for delivery concerns or comments from your ESP, as some interactivity elements tend to raise spam complaints or push your emails to the junk folder more often than others.

Then, you can use this information to enhance your efforts over time in a way that’s best for your audience. If one option increases engagement or better deliverability, use it more often. If one option results in poor deliverability over and over again, consider adjusting it or implementing it less often in the future.

Conclusion: Balancing Engagement with Deliverability

Interactive emails are an incredible opportunity to engage with a captive audience. Instead of a traditional email that contains text and perhaps a static image, a brand can create an interactive email with image galleries, quizzes, and polls, hover features, countdown timers, and even videos integrated within the email itself and within the email without clicking through to a brand action. If done correctly, this not only increases click-through rates and conversion but helps cultivate a better rapport with customers and brand loyalty.

However, in addition to the benefits of utilizing interactive emails, it’s important to assess the implementation process unbiasedly, especially concerning email deliverability. Because it won’t matter how great the message is if the brands can’t get their emails to their subscribers’ inboxes.

Yet before you go about creating these email campaigns full of interactive possibilities, it’s essential to know the potential challenges first. While interactivity is trending, many email clients haven’t caught up with the latest and greatest features. For instance, what works in one inbox may bust or not render in another and either way baffles readers, turning them away from your message and costing potential revenue. This is why fallback content is critical. Always assume interactivity will fail within a given client and, at the very least, readers either won’t see the intended feature or will see a correctly rendered version of your email.

The second element of effective optimization has to do with ensuring this compatibility. Whether you create these emails from scratch or with a template, always test your pieces using Litmus or Email on Acid to preview them across devices and clients. These resources help you render your email content interactively across dozens of inboxes to ensure your point gets across, no matter where it’s read.

In addition, testing goes beyond just the visual elements; A/B test interactivity versus non-interactivity to see what’s preferred by your audience and what’s least likely to impact deliverability. You can always learn which types of interactivity work better than others based on your audience makeup and vertical.

Of course, beyond design and testing, the fundamentals of a successful email go beyond how it looks. You need to have the right technical foundation. Email authentication, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC need to be properly configured and maintained. These settings authenticate to mailbox providers that your message is real and legitimate, and it will help foster deliverability for the more complicated HTML-based elements like the interactivity itself.

Ultimately, however, don’t forget about your users. Interactivity should simplify the email experience, not complicate it. Be clear in intention, accessible without frustration, and always add value. Whether you want feedback, you want to conduct a flash sale, or you need to provide an interactive image slider of a new product, ensure that your interactive options are always in service to your readers with clear purpose.

If done correctly, interactive emails can transform your email marketing campaign for the better. Just make sure they will be appreciated by paying attention to compatibility, testing all links and features, and including strong authentication. It’ll be worth it in the end when your clients and leads not only interact with your emails but also take action.