In-Mail Shopping Cart — Interactive Email Enhancements
In-Mail Shopping Cart — Interactive Email Enhancements
Niven Ranchhod
Bringing the shopping experience to your inbox, let’s take a look at how email shopping experiences can mirror or even replace fully fledged ecommerce shopping in the age where in app purchasing via Tik Tok & Instagram is on the rise. Learn more →
Bringing the shopping experience to your inbox.
🔗 View the in-mail shopping cart test case.
At Mailix, we strive to push the limits of what is capable in email.
To date, we’ve built numerous 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 for a partner using Mailix, was an in-mail shopping cart to bring the shopping experience to the inbox.
Static to Interactive
A basic product email design can easily be turned into an interactive experience for your customers by mimicking your website experience.
Small interactions such as colour changes and image swapping on hover, entice customers to interact further. From there, they can easily look through a select group of products, checking colour options, sizes and prices while checking the fit of the clothing on the model, in the image carousel.
An email like this could be used to show off:
🚗 a new line of vehicles
🛒 a grocery chain’s specials
✏️ a range of stationery
… and so on.
The possibilities and use cases are endless.
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. Thankfully, we can mimic most web experiences in email, when it comes to product grids, previews and even mimicking the navigation to a new page, all in an email.
Under the hood
Interactive emails utilise HTML & CSS only. While the implementation 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?
Email client support isn’t amazing for interactive emails as complex as this, Apple Mail being the only email client that does support this type of email, in full. However, 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.
For all other emails clients, we can either fallback to a static alternative, linking to each of the products directly on your website, or we can simply link all fallback images to the online view of the email, allowing the customer to see the interactive email in full, in their chosen browser.
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 you.
Hope to chat to you soon,
Niven – Email Developer
