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Interactive email – a data-driven email experience in SFMC

In the digital era, it is important to find ways to get customer insights by providing a seamless customer experience to the subscribers and increasing customer engagement, whether it is through capturing reviews, feedback, quick surveys, progressive profiles, case forms, or product reviews.

Thus, Salesforce Marketing Cloud came up with the latest solution named Interactive emails to mitigate the above-mentioned challenges by allowing marketers to receive subscriber information like profile data, product reviews, and sales lead directly from embedded forms in an email. It will enable subscribers to act directly in their inbox with web-like functionality in an email.

This content will highlight 3 different aspects of Marketing cloud interactive emails as mentioned below:

Where, why, and how to use interactive emails

How to create an interactive email
Considerations of interactive email
Where, why, and how to use interactive emails

Nowadays data plays a vital role for every marketer. To understand the customer ultimately data capture is important without annoying them. In many ways, SFMC interactive email collects customer data by directly engaging with marketers’ email emails without leaving the inbox. The most common scenarios are as follows.

Get Profile data: Collect or update subscriber preferences and demographic data, such as name, birthday, product preferences, and interests. With the help of Marketing Cloud’s proprietary scripting language AMPscript, one can pre-populate data from a sendable data extension.

Considerations for creating Interactive Email Form

Data Extensions: With Create, View, and Update permissions for storing data.

Interactive Email Page: A landing on SFMC Cloud pages need to be built for processing user information.

Content: Different types of Interactive Email Forms like fallback content, email form & confirmation message can be designed.

Create Case Form: Allow subscribers to create or update a support case. Service Cloud customers can use Journey Builder to pass this data to the Service Cloud and create a case.

Create Lead Form: Capture or update subscriber information from your leads. Sales Cloud customers can use Journey Builder to pass this data to Salesforce.

Capture reviews about product or services: Collecting a post-purchase review on customer satisfaction for a product or service through multiple questions or a single response survey. Complete the Response Capture field by selecting an existing data extension or creating one.

The above-mentioned forms can be created by navigating to the Content builder and selecting the required form as per the business use case described below.

Steps to Create an Interactive Email Page

Navigate to Cloud Pages after you Create a Collection, click Create, then click Interactive Email Page.

In the Cloud Page, select the content block called Email form as highlighted below to create the content.

Alternatively, you can also select the Redirect to a URL to send your subscribers to a different page from the content tab drop-down options.

Once your page is completed, don’t forget to save, and publish it.

Limitations of Interactive Email Form

Interactive Email Forms and personalized fallback content blocks are not supported by all the email clients except for the followings

Apple: iPhone, iPad, and Mail

Gmail: Webmail and App

Yahoo/AOL Webmail

Marketing Cloud Interactive Email Forms are available in Marketing Cloud Pro editions or higher.

Wrapping Up

The Salesforce marketing cloud interactive email form enables users to set up new and creative ways to engage with specific target audiences for capturing the all-important customer data and providing a seamless customer experience. If you would like to know more about interactive email, do contact us.