Enabler provide best practice advice utilising kinect hero images within your email marketing templates to B2B and B2C communications, from a multi award-winning email agency.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s Kinetic Email!

“Kinetic email… what’s that?” we hear you say. “That must be the latest in email development!” Well… actually, despite sounding like a new type of superhero, Kinetic emails (or as we sometimes call it ‘Captain Kinetic’), have been around for a few years now.

Kinetic email was coined by the Oracle Corporation in July 2014 for their B&Q email marketing campaign. The email they produced used HTML5 and CSS3 and contained an interactive hero image carousel, which was triggered by mouse hover buttons.

B&Q had great results from their debut Kinetic email;

  • 18% increase in responder-to-open rates, with 32% increase among club members.
  • 42,000 click-throughs to the website.
  • 30% decrease in time spent on email.

(Click here for the full marketing report from Oracle.)

The clever part of using a kinetic carousel image which housed all the information and links meant there was less time spent in an email by the user.  A regular email format would have seen users scrolling down through different sections, with the information and links spread out across the email – the Kinetic Hero, however, had everything in one place.

B&Q successfully decreased the time spent in email and upped the click through rate, by directing the user (via the interactive carousel), without the need to scroll through the whole page.

The Power of Kinetic

So the basis of Kinetic images within email is the use of CSS3 transitions and animations, which opens up lots of possibilities for captivating or interactive emails.
Some dynamic content examples that Kinetic email might utilise include:-

  • Hamburger style menus
  • Forms
  • Graphs
  • GIFs
  • Polls
  • Tap to reveal
  • Flip / hover / carousels or slideshow images
  • Embedded video and more…

As you can see, Kinetic Heroes have a lot of work to do.

Kinetic Heroes And Their Many Disguises…

Just as superheroes have their different identities, i.e. Spider-Man and Peter Parker or Superman and Clark Kent, Kinetic emails can be broken down into three different types:

1. Kinect

These are the emails that utilise CSS transitions and animations. A good example of this is the auto scroll carousels.

2. Kinetic Interactive

These type of emails are where the user actually interacts with the email. The example below has a collapsible hamburger menu. Other examples could be a carousel where each slide has a clickable button.