The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Integrations
Connect with 100+ integrations
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
When it comes to email marketing, so many brands are trying to get the competitive edge. Let’s face it, even seemingly small gains, a few added percentage points to click through or open rates, can translate into a big deal on the bottom line.
And while there are lots of strategies and tactics out there, everything from segmentation to testing copy comes to mind, some of the best results you’re going to see will come from going interactive.
Why?
Because customers love it!
Check out these survey results. You’ll see that in every instance when customers were asked what kind of email content they’d be more likely to engage with, they went interactive.
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Where gamification fits with interactive content
Gamification plays right into all of those cool psychological triggers that make reveal marketing through interactive content so engaging.
First, opening an email and seeing something different, something that asks for your engagement piques curiosity. It’s really hard not to play around with something that looks fun, right? You’ve got to click or interact to scratch that itch, otherwise it might be floating around in your brain all day.
Tied in with being compelled by curiosity is the fear of missing out (FOMO). You’ve probably felt this yourself before and it can drive all sorts of action. Sometimes, you just have to do something because you don’t want to miss out on what’s hidden behind door #1.
Finally, because gamification primes customers for a reward, you’re building what’s called operant conditioning too. Essentially, what this does is start to establish a connection in your customer’s mind between taking an action and getting a reward. That connection makes it more likely for customers to repeat the process again and again.
Each of these factors are highly emotional triggers too. Customers who are moved to engage with interactive content are building emotional connections and feelings about your brand from the very start.
That’s a good thing if you want to keep them around for the long term![mk_image src=”http://zembuladev.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/bula-surf-shop-email.jpg”]
Different types of gamification for email marketing
When it comes to building an email marketing campaign around gamification, there are all sorts of things you can do.
A few common examples include:
Surveys
Quizzes
Trivia
Scratch-its
Tests
Games
Click to reveal (discounts, special offers, prizes, etc.)
As you can see, gamification doesn’t have to be super complicated. It’s all about just setting the stage to hit that first trigger that makes someone want to interact. Sometimes, even asking for simple actions, can lead to an improvement in results.
There are a couple of different ways you can insert gamification into your emails too.
Some of these can be inserted right into the email itself, and your customer can engage with it directly from their inbox. For more complex gamification schemes, you might include a link in the email that will bring your readers to a separate landing page that features the game.
Plenty of brands out there are already transforming their marketing strategies to include interactive emails, and gamification is just one part of it.
A few tips to keep in mind
As you get started thinking about gamification and how you can add it to your email campaigns, we want to share a few tips or best practices to keep in mind along the way.
Remember your psychology
The more you think about your customer’s psychology in gamification, the better off you’re going to be. Even if you’re just getting started, keeping a few simple triggers in mind and creating interactive content around that is going to be a winning combination.
Make it engaging
That’s the point, right? Email has gotten more sophisticated and so have customers. With our inboxes exploding on a daily basis, you need to create something that is eye catching and will grab your customer’s attention in just a few seconds.
Don’t forget the reward
While actually interacting with gamified content is a lot of fun, the thing that people are looking for at the end is their reward for participating. So, it’s your job to make sure it’s something that not only appeals to your customers right off the bat but also makes them want to keep coming back for more.
Remember these tips as your planning your emails and you’ve got the foundations of a great campaign.
Are you ready to start gamifying your emails?
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
You’ve got a growing flow of website traffic and a steady stream of email subscribers joining your list each month.
Sounds like a solid foundation, so what’s the problem?
Your open rates.
Even though you are growing your list, the percentage of people who are opening your emails is declining.
While that may not seem like a huge deal at first, declining email open rates can have a lot of knock-on effects, and impact your bottom line.
Chances are, you’re probably making one (or more) of a few common mistakes that a lot of brands see. Or, you’re not getting creative and embracing the potential of email.
Focus on fixing these, and you’ll likely start seeing your open rates improve over time.
Ready to figure out why your open rates might be suffering?
Read on!
1. Bad subject lines
Let’s get into the basics. If your email subject line isn’t enticing, you’re not going to get a lot of people in a rush to open it. Remember, inboxes are jam-packed today, estimates are over 280 billion–yes with a b–emails get sent every single day. You need to stand out.
2. Inactive subscribers
You’ve worked hard to build your email list, but over time the number of inactive subscribers is only going to go up. Unfortunately, inactive subscribers don’t open emails. So it’s a good idea to set aside some time to cull your list. You can even send a goodbye campaign to lock in exactly who gets removed by asking them to self-select.
3. Poor timing
With so many emails going out daily, being able to calculate the best time to send out emails to get higher open rates has become a bit of a science. Anything to get that edge, right?[mk_image src=”http://zembuladev.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/screenshot-2019-01-31-20.02.16.png”]There have been plenty of studies over the last few years that have all pretty much come to the same conclusion; aim to send your email newsletters and announcements out for 11 am EST Monday through Thursday.
4. Your emails are boring
It’s natural for some subscribers to drop off over time. But if you see a significant drop off after your first welcome series or newsletter, then it could be that your emails have a boring design or stale content. And once that dreaded thought gets into the head of your readers, they are more likely than not just to ignore your emails–unless you can grab their attention again. Interactive email marketing is a great way to do that.
5. You’re sending the same email to everyone
This could be a failure of segmentation. In an ideal world, you don’t want to send the same email to everyone on your list all the time. Instead, you want to break down your main list into smaller segments. From there, you can craft different emails that will appeal directly to that group.
6. Failed delivery
A study by ReturnPath found that in 2015, 24% of commercial emails in the US were ending up in spam.That’s a huge number! Check to make sure you’re not falling victim to spam. Make sure you’re sending quality emails without those common spam-y trigger words in your subject line. And send an email alerting your subscribers to whitelist your emails.
7. Not mobile friendly
Almost half of all people check out emails on their mobile devices first. Both iPhones and iPads are two of the three most popular email clients. Today, if something doesn’t load properly (or takes too long to load) on a phone or tablet, the chances of your reader opening another email from you are significantly reduced.
8. Unrecognizable from name
When it comes to setting up your emails to be sent out, make sure you keep the ‘from’ name recognizable. While its fun to experiment and play with the content of your email and your subject lines, doing too many tweaks to that from name can confuse your subscribers and lead them to ignore your emails.
9. Not offering value
Email is a two-way street. When your readers first signed up, they gave away something important (their email address) in exchange for you filling their inbox with great offers, surprises, fun stuff, and ideas or products they’d love. If you’re not holding up to your end of the bargain over time, it’s not an easy choice for your subscribers to move on to the brands that are giving them lots of value.
Ready to improve those open rates?
We know you can. By just paying attention to even a handful of these issues you can start to get your subscribers opening your emails again, and hopefully, clicking once they’re inside.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
