How The Product Folks increased community engagement with interactive emails

Challenge

The Product Folks is a volunteer-driven community with over 170K members and 100+ partners. TPF offers online resources, masterclasses, and offline events for aspiring product managers.

They also run a popular newsletter on product management (PM) case studies. The newsletter enjoyed a good open rate and subscriber growth, but the team knew they weren’t leveraging its full potential yet.

TPF wanted to fix this and turn the newsletter into a highly engaged medium fostering participation in community events, courses, and other branches.

The challenge was finding a way to accomplish this without adding complexity.

Solution

At this juncture, they learned about interactive emails and how to create a gamified experience inside inboxes. Be it quizzes, polls, or feedback collection, everything happens inside an inbox, and emails become interactive channels like apps or landing pages.

However, creating them required coding expertise. This is where Mailmodo came in.

With its drag-and-drop editor and prebuilt, interactive widgets, Mailmodo enables marketers to create interactive emails within minutes with zero coding. It also provides a complete email marketing solution, from automation to email analytics.

So, The Product Folks started sending interactive newsletters using Mailmodo. Here's a list of innovations that they were able to do with interactive emails

An in-mail challenge for product marketers Engaged learning is always more impactful. So, the team at TPF started adding a challenge for its subscribers after each newsletter edition's main story. This exercise required them to use the knowledge they'd gained in the newsletter to solve a PM problem.

The best part? They can submit the answers inside their inboxes. An example below 👇

An in-mail quiz to master PM fundamentals Every edition of The Product Folks' newsletter now has a customary quiz called 'The PM Pitstop.' It includes 3 situational PM questions, allowing subscribers to pick answers directly in their inboxes. They instantly see the correct answer, revising a new PM concept in an immersive way each time.

A feedback form or rating widget Every edition also has a feedback form where subscribers can share their opinions without leaving their inboxes or a rating widget that lets them give feedback in a single click.

Check out one such template below with all of these elements in action. 👇

Outcome

After TPF turned its newsletter interactive, it started to see higher community engagement and more subscribers engaging with other TPF initiatives. For example

☑️ Through the interactive newsletter, many subscribers joined other vertical communities under TPF, such as ‘Women in PM’, ‘The Fintech Folks’, etc.

☑️ Its online and offline events, such as Grab Chai, started seeing subscribers register through the newsletter.

On deeper analysis, the team learned that the newsletter activated 15% members into the community

Key Learnings

Newsletters can be so much more than a broadcast.

Interactive emails open up a new world of possibilities for newcomers. Your subscribers can take quizzes, polls, and even play games in email without leaving their inboxes. The Product Folks followed this trick and turned their newsletter into an engagement channel that sparked conversations and encouraged subscribers to engage with other community branches.

Good newsletters are built upon subscribers' preferences. The success of a newsletter depends upon its subscribers’ feedback. While opens and clicks help, direct inputs like suggestions or ratings are more valuable. You can link an external form to collect these, but the extra step of visiting another page is more likely to prevent a higher response.

However, with interactive emails, you can add one-click rating widgets or a form with an open-ended or multiple-choice question to collect more detailed feedback. The Product Folks utilize these features in every edition, consistently review feedback submissions, and adjust their newsletter strategy, increasing engagement.