In 2026, inboxes are more crowded than ever; it is estimated that 376.4 billion emails were sent every day in 2025, and static, text-heavy emails are easy to ignore. If you want your campaigns to stand out and truly engage recipients, interactivity isn’t optional. It’s expected. Interactive emails turn passive readers into active participants, and that can dramatically boost engagement, click-throughs and conversions.
Here are seven proven ways to make your emails more interactive, and why they matter more than ever in 2026.
Mobile-first design
Let’s start with the basics. An email can’t be in any way interactive if it is not displaying correctly. The number of mobile users is forecast to grow by several hundred million over the next few years. And more than 40% of consumers check their email on mobile devices. This means that ensuring that your emails look the best they possibly can on desktop and mobile is increasingly essential to ensure even the most basic of interactions.
Dynamic content
You’d be forgiven for thinking that once an email has been sent out, its content is set in stone. Not necessarily. With the use of dynamic content blocks, you can create elements of your email that will automatically refresh the content every time an email is opened. It also means that you can automatically personalise the content of your email to each individual recipient, without any additional work.
Dynamic content has such a wide variety of uses. You can put it to use by keeping product pricing and availability up to date. Pulling through booking details, or simply ensuring the copy, imagery, language and currency is completely relevant to the recipient.
Personalisation
By adding personalisation to your emails, you are emulating a one-to-one conversation, increasing both engagement and interactivity. There are so many personalisation tactics you can execute within email. In fact, we have numerous guides and blog posts on the subject. You can start small by using the recipient’s first name. Or segment your audience based on their demographic and buying behaviour.
But if you really want to improve interactivity, then use dynamic content blocks to pull through personalised information that will be tailored to the individual recipient. This could include the products they will be most interested in or events and store locations that are closest to them.
Live shopping baskets
The average shopping basket abandonment rate is a whopping 74.52%. That’s a lot of potential revenue being missed. Abandoned basket emails are ideal for reminding recipients of their purchase and encouraging them to check out. As this may be your last shot at securing the sale, you want to make these emails as engaging and interactive as possible. Live shopping baskets include detailed information about the items that the recipient has abandoned, including product name, image, pricing, and even availability. This is particularly useful if their item is on sale or has nearly sold out.
Animated GIFs
GIFs offer the perfect way to add movement and visuals to your emails, without the hassle of using videos, which can add to the loading speed of your emails. And of course, can be resource-intensive to create. GIFs can be used in a variety of ways to grab attention. Ticking clocks if you’re counting down to an event or sale. Featuring your audience’s favourite TV programs or movies.
To showcase a product in use or items of clothing on a model. Cakes or fireworks for celebrations. Or you could even flex your skills and create your own GIF tailored to your business.
Countdown timers
If you wanted to get a little more sophisticated than a ticking clock for your countdowns, then you can incorporate a dynamic countdown timer. Not only are countdown timers a great interactive visual, but they also add a sense of urgency to your sales or events, encouraging users to take action quickly. And by utilising a dynamic content block for your timer, the clock will automatically update every time the email is opened or refreshed. So it will always accurately show the time left.
Quizzes and polls
Quizzes and polls are a great way to gamify your emails in an interactive way. This could include a poll to encourage recipients to vote, through to a survey where recipients can answer a simple question This type of interaction is regularly used for customer surveys too, such as an NPS (Net Promoter Score). As well as making your email interactive, this also encourages recipients to engage directly within the email without having to click away.
Are you inspired by these interactive emails?
At Spotler, we can help you create engaging, interactive emails just like these. With the help of our all-in-one AI email & web marketing platform, and our Customer Success Team, we can help you acquire new customers, increase revenue, and grow customer loyalty. Get in touch to find out more.
