The Next Big Thing: Kinetic Email Design

Email marketers are always seeking new ways to standout. So what is the next big trend that will increase user engagement and boost conversion rates? 2017 was the year of interactive emails, according to Litmus. This interactivity answered the call of innovation then, but in 2018, email marketers are taking it a step further and boosting creativity with “kinetic email design.”

At its core, kinetic email is a coding technique that creates high-impact, visual interactive emails within the inbox. Popular kinetic design elements include rotating banners, search in email, graphs, photo carousels, interactive shopping carts, and hover-over animations, to name a few. These elements create an experience that closely resembles browsing a website, so users can interact more freely with content and explore various offerings within an email.

Email designers can implement kinetic design with template-level design HTML5 and CSS3 creativity. Kinetic design can be broken down into three categories:

1. Kinetic: emails that rely on CSS transitions and animations to deliver content. A common example is an automatic sliding carousel.

2. Kinetic Interactive: emails that include digital elements and content that respond to users’ actions. A common example is interactive navigation buttons or collapsible menus.

3. Kinetic Effects: emails that use CSS animation and interactivity to enhance content. A common example would be dynamic effects such as falling snow and blinking graphics. Hover-over animations are another feature that would fall into this category.

So, what’s the catch?

Kinetic design only works within Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, AOL, Outlook 2003, iPad, and a few android clients. Thankfully, these popular email clients often represent a large portion of a marketer’s audience, so implementing kinetic design is worthwhile for increasing engagement. As a fallback for email clients that don’t support kinetic design, kinetic content may just be hidden or replaced by a static layout.

If you haven’t started using kinetic design for your emails, now is the right time to consider jumping-in and having some fun designing the type of interactive, engaging, and exciting content your subscribers are responding to in greater numbers.