The Evolution of Emails in Email Microsites

“The future emails will look more like microsites than static messages,” wrote Chad White, research director for the popular Litmus email distribution service, in his book “ Email Marketing Rules ”. Soon, users will be able to watch videos, browse product catalogs and make purchases directly from the inbox.

The book was published in 2014, when there were certain signals indicating that these predictions would come true. But in 2015, according to White, email development accelerated significantly. Here are just a few examples of new functionality that you should pay attention to when creating mailing lists .
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Scrolling content and product catalogs

The first attempts to create “scrollable” email content were made using technologies such as JavaScript, but various security issues surfaced. Today, with CSS3 and HTML5, you can easily make mail carousels that work the same way as carousels on websites.

Many well-known companies already use this technique in letters sent to their subscribers. Here is an example of mailing from a British retailer B & Q:

Navigation

Convenient navigation elements optimized for touch devices are a sure way to increase conversions. The lack of space in emails led to the use of the hamburger icon for the menu.

Video

Embedding video in email messages is not supported in all email clients, but there are services with which you can achieve good results in this direction (for example, LiveClicker or Movable Ink).

For example, constructor maker Lego used LiveClicker to include in its message a 15-second video that could be played, paused, etc. In addition, in some cases, video content can be used as a background for an email message.

Live Content

The content of the e-mails is no longer hewn out of stone, but may change. There is a technique that involves replacing images in already sent letters, but this approach has its limits - for example, in Gmail, users will not see any pictures at all.

A more elegant method is the use of so-called "live" content. With this technology, you can, for example, create a countdown clock that shows the correct time for each user who opened the message. Even with its help, you can embed in letters, say, a local weather forecast (as the Timberland brand did in a message dated May 23, 2013).



With this technology, you can even change the entire content of the message, depending on the time. For example, the company Best of the Best (the letter highlighted different cars).

Payments

The possibility of buying goods built into email messages has been discussed for quite some time. In March 2015, it became known that Google plans to allow paying bills directly from Gmail:

What will these changes affect?

All of these innovations significantly change the idea of ​​email and how it works (the subscriber opens a letter-clicks on the content-conversion occurs and the transition to the landing page). Now this process can be much shorter, and one or several stages can be completely absent in the process of interaction:



Among other things, among marketers, email has a reputation as an extremely well-readable channel for attracting audiences. The introduction of new technologies will require the development of new approaches to analytics and the measurement of the engagement of recipients of letters.

Some observers may consider these innovations as regular “intrigues of marketers”, and that letters containing any of the listed elements should be immediately sent to spam, but they can also be viewed from a different angle. In the modern world, users do not have much time, and such “microsites” help to save it - to pay for goods directly in the mail client, to watch the video offered by the company, whose newsletter is signed by a person, do not need to make extra clicks, and so on.

The problem is the fact that new technologies for quite a long time will be differently supported by various mail programs. In order to effectively use these tools, it is necessary to analyze the fact that customers use subscribers of a certain distribution, and the fact that these programs support the necessary functionality.

Also, do not forget about creating simple versions of letters for such programs, and that all new-fangled technologies should be in place, and in many cases a plain-text message works fine.