In a 2023 interview, Gloria Mark, PhD, professor of informatics at the University of California, dropped this truth bomb: “The internet and digital devices have affected our ability to focus.” And the numbers? Not pretty. Our attention span has dropped from 75 seconds in 2012 to a measly 47 seconds post-pandemic.

Email marketers, this should terrify you. Capturing those precious seconds of attention requires an inbox experience worth stopping for. And emails so engaging they hook recipients long enough to convert.

Interactive email templates can make this happen. They slash the hoops your audience has to jump through until they are rewarded with web-like interactive experiences in the limited real estate of emails.

Interactive email design is fun, entertaining, and—duh—interactive.

Yes, technically, interactive emails are beasts to create. Standard email development is hard on its own, making it interactive is harder.

But when the alternative is the shift from passive viewing to active engagement, those challenges seem nothing. It cuts through the inbox noise like nothing else.

If you’re wondering whether interactive email templates deserve a spot in your 2025 marketing strategy, keep reading. This one’s for the skeptics, the curious, and the marketers who refuse to be ignored.

Top 5 Reasons To Use Interactive Email Designs

Before we go all in, let’s recall that interactive email templates are challenging, if not impossible, to code.

Email clients show a varying degree of support for interactive elements. So, marketers still need to code static HTML fallbacks for subscribers whose email clients are known to mishandle email interactivity. If you have interactive email template services, that becomes a lot more breathable. You could dodge a ton of coding struggles. For initial development, testing, and ongoing maintenance.

Anyhoo, besides the fact that 60% of subscribers are more likely to engage with interactive email designs, and 50% love interacting with content without leaving their inbox, there are other reasons for having interactive email templates in your email design system.

1)   Give Subscribers An (Easy) Say In Their Email Experience

Interactive email templates authorize subscribers to interact with the email content at their own pace and will. Such an email experience sticks in memory more than passive reading or skimming. Plus, the interaction is ridiculously easy!

Email interactivity, especially above the fold, eliminates friction for subscribers to act. Click, swipe, hover, reveal, scratch—whatever the type of interaction, interactive email designs bring them to subscribers’ inboxes. These interactions don’t make subscribers drag their feet to another landing page. The interactivity happens right in their email inbox.

Image Source: Email From Litmus

Check your own inbox. Notice how image carousels, accordions, hamburger menus, hot spots, quizzes, and live polls demand your input in a way that feels inviting, not pushy? That’s because they make you feel valued.

“But wait,” you say, “static emails have clickable elements too!” True, but there’s a psychological difference. While clicking an email link and engaging with interactive content may seem like identical actions, your audience perceives them quite differently. Interacting inside an email feels quicker and simpler than clicking to a new page.

With a lower barrier to action, subscribers engage with your interactive email template better. As a result, interactive elements often get up to twice as much engagement as standard clicks to landing pages, says Email expert Chad White.

2)   Boosts Click-through Rates

Facelift ordinary design components with subtle interactive touches like hover animations. Pack mountains of content into clean dropdowns. Collect feedback through interactive polls. Each interactive element makes your emails feel clickable and alive.

Subscribers can cycle through the product catalogue and image galleries. They interact with the content without navigating away from the email. This only helps boost the email click-through rate. For example, embedded polls and accordion menus encourage more clicks than static calls-to-action.

See The Entire Email

A brilliant real-world example of this is T.M. Lewin’s “Because Every Day is Different” campaign. Subscribers were asked to pick their favorite outfit for each day of the week, right inside the email, to win £1000.

When a look received over 100 clicks, a “trending outfit” message appeared with a live click count, updating every time the email was opened.

Seeing responses update in real-time created a compelling feedback loop that increased subscriber engagement. The results? Impressive: 116% increase in click-through rates and a 12% increase in revenue.

3)   Are Reliable Data Capture Machines

Google postponed (again) the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome in 2025. By no means should you think that third-party cookies are not going away. They are. Just that it got delayed for this year.

This means brands now have extra time to prepare and explore alternatives to third-party cookies. Frankly, the alternatives are right in front of us–your interactive email templates.

Using interactive elements like surveys and ratings is a quick and easy way to collect useful data. This is gold for marketers trying to figure out what subscribers like, helping them with segmentation and personalization for future campaigns.

4)   Make Personalization More Personalized

With the data gathered from interactive email templates, you can tailor future emails to each subscriber’s interests and behaviors. Over 45% of marketers using personalization saw better results after adding interactive elements to their emails.

Kate Spade nailed this with a live poll featuring a branded progress bar. As subscribers voted for favorite categories and percentages, the progress bar was updated live with each email open. The click data served as a real-time indicator of individual interests.

Kate Spade took personalization a step further. Just 24 hours later, the brand sent highly targeted follow-up emails. Each participant received a personalized email featuring live, in-stock products from the category they’d clicked on. Non-voters received a separate email showcasing bestsellers.

5)   Fight Email Fatigue

Subscribers’ inboxes are flooded with static, cloned email messages. As email counts climb higher, recipients develop a numbing resistance known as email fatigue. It is then that they start ignoring or deleting your emails.

Interactive email designs stand out and keep content feeling fresh. Gamified elements, product reveals, and interactive storytelling capture attention and make emails something subscribers look forward to.

This novelty combats email fatigue, reducing unsubscribe rates and keeping your audience engaged over time. When everyone else sends the same old thing, you deliver an experience.

Final Thoughts

Interactive email templates are cool and captivating. Not all of them are difficult to implement. If you’ve been putting them off till “someday,” it’s time to take the plunge. Start basic. Pick one interactive element. Test it. Learn from it. Yes, you’ll need fallbacks. Yes, you’ll need testing. But all worth it for all the benefit from the engaging elements you’ve woven into your email.