Interactive Email Forms- Beyond the Basics

Interactive Emails

Many a times you might have wanted to give your feedback, but often give it a pass dreading the lengthy surveys and feedback forms. Why cant this process be simple, quick and easy? As part of March’20 release, Marketing Cloud introduced Interactive Email to set aside the complicated surveys, external preference centers and lead generation forms and make the email messages more innovative, engaging and interactive – all this without leaving the inbox.

Interactive Email Forms fundamentally change how people interact with email and enhances the experience and enables to:

• Collect More Customer Data : reduce friction by embedding reviews, progressive profiles, and lead forms in email
• Use Data to Drive Personalization: Respond with personalized content or kick off actions in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud
• Boost Engagement: Enable users to take action directly in the inbox with compelling interactive content
• Get Results: Increase reviews collected, expand customer data profiles, and drive more actions from email

Interactive Email Forms Use Cases

Type	Description
Profile Data	Collect preferences or demographic data, such as name, birthday, product preferences, and interests—directly in your email.
Quick Surveys	Collect quick feedback from a customer with a one-question survey.
Product Reviews	Collect product reviews directly within an email. The customer selects a star rating or writes a review.
Lead Forms	Collect customer information for a sales associate that can be passed into Sales Cloud.

Implementation best practices

Consider this before starting your implementation:

Design the Interactive Experience keeping these in mind:

• Keep it clear and simple
• Mimic familiar experiences
• Be repetetive
• Dont be afraid to call out the interactive elements !

Support of this experience varies by Email Clients. Here are some that support interactivity functionality:

• Apple: iPhone, iPad and Mail
• Gmail: Webmail and App
• Yahoo/ AOL Webmail

Based on the email client, there may be visual differences in how the email renders. For email clients that don’t support interactive environment : they may get no content displayed or a static content.

How to measure success

Interactive Email Forms Building Blocks:

• Content: Content Builder blocks are used to build your Interactive Email Forms. These include your email template,  fallback content, email form, and confirmation message.
• Cloud Pages: Used for confirmation and for processing form’s data
• Data Extension: Used to store data from the form

Elements of an Interactive Form:

• Data requirements: Define a list of form’s questions and data requirements
• Confirmation message: Create a content block for the success message to be used in the Interactive Email Page
• Interactive Email page: Create a landing page in CloudPages to be used for data processing. Select the created confirmation message for successful form submission. 
• Fallback Content: Content to be displayed for unsupported email clients
• Interactive Email Form: Create an email form block that includes form inputs. This maps to Cloud Page and the DE.
• Email Content

How do you use data?

Many more enhancements to follow in the future releases, be sure to follow the upcoming releases.

Resources:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/interactive-email-forms

Recording:

This post is a summary of the Technical Marketers Meeting: Interactive Email Forms, led by Matt Schmitter. You can find the recording of the session here.

About Technical Marketers meeting:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud conducts Technical Marketers Monthly Meeting with technical experts where they share the latest and key features, best practices, use cases and walk through demos. It is intended for any one in the Marketing domain: Administrators, Developers, Architects, Channel Marketers, Partners. It is free to attend and also a great opportunity to discover the latest/key features directly from the Salesforce’s technical experts, explore it live thru walk through demos and get the questions answered.

This happens bi-monthly, be sure to follow Guilda Hilaire for the latest updates on schedule and topics for the upcoming meetings.