Car configurator in Email — Interactive Email
Car configurator in Email — Interactive Email
Niven Ranchhod
Email can be so much more than a static advertisement linking to a website. We can build complete interactive mini ecommerce solutions for your inbox. That includes the product selection and configuration process.
Learn more →
The future of car shopping, directly in your inbox.
🔗 View the email car configurator.
At Mailix, we strive to push the limits of what is capable in email.
We’ve built a variety of interactive solutions for our clients including:
- Surveys
- Calendars
- Restaurant menus
- NPS Ratings
- Appointment bookings
- In-mail shopping carts
And many other interactive examples, some which can be found in our
‘Best of Interactive Email’ collection.
One example we built as a proof of concept, to show the possibilities of interactive email is a car configurator using Tesla as a test case.
*** Important to note — this project was in no way affiliated with Tesla.
Selecting a car in the comfort of your inbox
With the push for commerce on mobile & social platforms, it’s only natural that we also push past the limitations of what we thought was possible in the inbox.
Imagine relaxing on the couch with a hot drink on a Sunday morning, phone in hand and you open an email from a local vehicle dealership or brand you’ve been keeping an eye on for your next daily driver and you’re conveniently given a look at their entire model range or a selection of their current deals.
With interactive email, we‘ve made this possible.
In the example above, we can click through different angles of the car, select paint and wheel options which update the slideshow image previews.
Linking the configurator options like this allows for a complete and interactive experience for the user. It directly mimics web functionality for the user and it means they don’t have to leave their inbox until they’ve made their mind up.
We’ve now developed this technology to a point where simply redirecting a user to a website, is the fallback option.
Picking it apart
This slideshow element can actually be isolated into a single element, say for a slideshow of a selection of models or parts.
Same goes for the range calculator. This could adapted to be a finance calculator with interactive options to set a payment plan.
Or we could even go further with our example and add more functionality. Maybe an expandable FAQs section or a form for the user to submit details for a call back.
A tool like this can be as simple or as complicated as required, to allow for the best experience for your users.
Design
To ensure a seamless experience for your customers, it’s probably best to keep the email look & feel, closely aligned to your website shopping experience.
We can actually mimic most web experiences in email.
Think — a grid or list of products which expand upon click / tap, to give you a preview of a product, or navigating between pages of content.
Give your users important information in the email, then navigate through to the website to complete a transaction OR better yet, why not have them complete the transaction in the email?
We can do that too!
Under the hood
Interactive emails utilise HTML & CSS only. No Javascript or frameworks required, apart from the backend server setup if the email requires a transaction or form submit.
While a build like this is a lot more complex than your typical email, we simply use some CSS trickery to make these emails interactive in your inbox.
Where does it work?
The list of email clients supporting interactive emails of this complexity is on the small end, Apple Mail being the only email client that does support this in it’s entirety. A few others (e.g. Gmail) will allow for click to expand or click to reveal elements.
But don’t let the fact that Apple Mail is the only email client that supports these more complex emails scare you off. Apple Mail is the most popular email client (at the point of writing this in 2022 [source: Litmus]), so it’s hard not to see the advantage of utilising this method of customer engagement when a large portion of your own customer base could be opening your emails in Apple Mail and seeing interactive content.
How do you get started?
✉️ Get in touch.
We love to chat everything email, even if it’s just to evaluate your current setup to see if interactive email would be helpful in your email journey.
Even if you have an initial idea, we can run with that and build a proof of concept which we will help implement and test with you to truly see if it’s a viable option for your user/customer base.
Hope to chat to you soon,
Niven – Email Developer
