First of all, let’s see what is a kinetic email. This is an email using a technique of coding that let you create impact interactive email such as carousels and/or animations. They use CSS animation and transitions. The final idea of this email is to create a website experience for the recipient. The kinetic email improves click and engagement.

A recent study demonstrates the results between two different brands, first one sending out a kinetic email and then the second one sending out non-kinetic emails. As the chart below, they prove the kinetic email increase the click rate up to 18% and click to open up to 10%.

by using the kinetic design, it can help you to capture the recipient’s attention and provide great reasons for your subscribers to click and get more engaged with your email marketing campaign.

The other advantage of the Kinetic email is that can improve your purchase transaction by removing steps.

The Birth of Kinetic Email

The kinetic email came around 2010, but the first showing of kinetic enhancements to an email template hit the mainstream in 2014. It made a huge splash with email developers everywhere. Using the combination of HTML and CSS to enable interactivity within email was possible and beautifully responsive to the email opener.  

Using kinetic email design it will improve the performance of different campaign metrics, such as open rates and duration of open within the email. Increased open rates with decreased time in email show how interactive display encourages subscriber interaction quickly. Some marketers prefer that users open and read emails for longer durations. While kinetic email is interactive, it’s more than just using a video or animated image within an email. Kinetic email design goes beyond by controlling template-level design elements with CSS3 and HTML5. It also falls back responsively to the opener’s email client’s functionality, degrading seamlessly for email client’s with stricter HTML acceptance.

Experian analysts determined that kinetic emails increased unique click rates by as much as 18.3 percent, and click-to-open rates by more than 10 percent.

Other findings included:

• Email volume increased 14 percent year-over-year, while open, click and transaction rates, revenue per email and average order volumes all remained relatively stable during the same time period.
• Fifty-six percent of total email opens occurred on mobile phones or tablets in Q4 2016.
• Revenue per email increased to $0.08 in Q4 2016 compared with $0.06 the previous quarter.

Experian recommends rolling out new designs in a staged fashion, from simple to more complex, and measuring the performance of campaigns with and without kinetic designs.

“You can also take it a step further and test based on the type of designs, choice of products, and audience segmentation. Maybe one type of messages works better for a particular audience.”

Kinetic emails also often incorporate fallback techniques that ensure that these emails do not render poorly on email clients that do not support kinetic content. For example, kinetic content may simply be hidden or an alternative simpler static layout may be displayed.

Although kinetic email is not a substitute for a well-crafted and targeted campaign, when used appropriately kinetic email can bolster a brand’s message and increase the recipients’ engagement and delight.