Episode 53: How Musafir, Foundit and BQ Prime drove conversions with interactive emails

With shortening attention span and higher competition, standing out in a crowded inbox is never easy. But with** interactive emails**, marketers can stand out and boost conversions by enabling user action in the inbox. Three such marketers, Vaibhav Khanna, Head of Product & Subscriptions, BQ Prime; Vineetha Shetty, Deputy General manager, Growth, Foundit and Teresa Coutinho, Assistant marketing manager, Musafir did just that and achieved remarkable results. We spoke to them at the Edition 2 of the Email Edge Summit: Turn Emails into Experiences to understand their goal and process. Watch the keynote session above 👆

Here’s are the main takeaways from the event:

Musafir - Travel Industry
Identifying high intent leads


Teresa Courtinho, Assistant marketing manager, Musafir was getting a lot of customer data from multiple sources - ads, social media ads, partners etc. In the past 3 years, she had data of 400,000+ users, and identifying users who were looking to purchase the UAE Tourist Visa (one of their highest selling products) was becoming a challenge.
So, she sent an email with an AMP form with these questions

• What's your contact number?
• How long do you want to be in the UAE for?
• Do you want to be here for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?
• When is it that you want to travel?
  
  “This helped the sales team segregate and pick the users to focus on every month, in order to achieve a particular target. And it was a huge game changer, as it helped boost revenue from the UAE Tourist Visa.” says Teresa.
  
  

Partner Campaign


Customers in the tourism industry are offer-loyal and not brand loyal. To change this, Teresa aimed to enhance the emotional connection with Mustafir by personalizing it with a fun social campaign in partnership with Munich Tourism and Munich Airport. The social campaign drove users to a gamified email campaign instead of a sales focussed email. The email campaign had the Christmas-themed "spin the wheel" widget which added a festive touch. Users had to spin the wheel, test their luck and win prizes. The effort was not only about selling products but also about giving something during the festive season. And the campaign received excellent feedback, particularly from Munich tourism.

Carousels in email


The Musafir team also experimented with various widgets, including an image carousel, but found the best response with polls combined with contact forms as the polls were more engaging with colorful designs and emojis. It led to higher open rates.
Teresa and her team are looking to include a cart abandonment template from Mailmodo. The new strategy would recognize customer interests before drop-offs and set reminders and incentives for conversion, like an upgrade on insurance or 5% off a visa. It would also promote cross-selling various options like cruise trips, tours, activities within Dubai, airport meet-and-greets and more. The excitement for this innovative approach is high, as it not only optimizes the sales process but also provides multiple conversion pathways.

Foundit - Recruitment Industry
Profile Updation


In the recruitment industry, updated candidate profiles are crucial. Using AMP emails, Vineetha Shetty, Deputy General manager, Growth, Foundit was able to boost profile updation in email. By incorporating interactive emailers, as part of the overall communication strategy, we were able to achieve 360% more conversions than a text based emailer.

Brand survey


Using AMP emails, foundit conducted a brand survey to get salary trends and create a monthly industry report called the FIT report.
Spin the wheel


Vineetha also ran multiple campaigns to experiment with different approaches. Compared to sending rewards in an HTML email and text-based email, she found that a gamified spin the wheel campaign worked much more effectively. She achieved 96% more conversion than what we had otherwise achieved with an HTML or a text message.

Virtual Career Fair
During a virtual career fair, they used interactive emails instead of Google Forms, streamlining the registration process. This interactive registration got them 400% more conversions and increased participation in the fair.

Boosting test adoption
To solve a drop-off problem with their test platform, Skillist, they tried various methods to preview test questions in email using test based methods but only found success with interactive quizzes inside email.

BQPrime:
Collecting information in email


Vaibhav Khanna Head of Product & Subscriptions, BQ Prime wanted to send out personalized webinar invitations based on the user preferences. So he used amp emails to send out an email to our paid subscribers and collectedf first party data on industry and designation. Earlier when they used to send them a typeform, there were multiple drop offs. With AMP emails, they have boosted conversions by 2X.

Dynamic emails


As newsletters competed with apps, Vaibhav increasingly found stale news in email. But, with dynamic auto-updating emails that update news in email post delivery, they were able to connect an RSS feed which updates the news in email three times a day.

Feedback in email


In the news publishing industry, engagement is vital. Through Mailmodo, Vaibhav Khanna Head of Product & Subscriptions, BQ Prime has replaced Google forms with interactive emails resulting in increased feedback from users. The team sends daily newsletters and tracks open and click rates, but needed qualitative metrics to measure engagement. So they introduced an emoji feature under newsletters to gauge user reactions, providing valuable insights to the editorial team. Recognizing what makes users happy or unhappy has helped in tailoring content that is more insightful.