Our guests keep getting more esteemed! Today is no exception.

Today, we’re joined by Jay Oram, Head of Development at Action Rocket, and also the recent winner of the David Baker Lifetime Achievement Award 2025 (Previously the Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year).

Seriously knowledgeable company.

Jay is about to impart his knowledge on building emails that add a little “pizazz” to our emails using moving and interactive elements.

We’re getting slightly technical, so put those thinking caps on.

You know it’s time to emerge, your emails included, so let’s dive in and learn with our expert community guest.

I spend a lot of time thinking about email.

Not only from an email developer perspective, but as a marketer and a recipient.

My team and I love bringing ideas to life in email, most of the time in a way marketers don’t realise is possible.

So in this Volume, I want to help dispel some myths about what is possible in email and provide you with ideas that range from simple to well… not so simple.

But all on a pathway to bring your email to life!

In the beginning.

As many other email experts have mentioned in these Email Advice From A Friend emails, several elements are important to make sure you have in place before trying to get ‘fancy’ with email design…

Plus, I’m sure a few more I am missing here. However, the main thing is to ensure you have the fundamentals of sending emails nailed before adding any extras.

Consider this:

Interactive and innovative email is the icing on the cake of email, with a dodgy cake though, icing alone is not going to save it!

Animation, you say?

The simplest way to breathe some life into your email could be some animation, in the form of a GIF

The example below, from the BBC, won an award from Litmus for ‘Visual Visionary’ - no fancy code or lengthy email, just a well-designed GIF.

All email clients support animated GIF images, except for older versions of Outlook for Windows Desktop, which will only show the first frame.

You can either make sure all the information you want shown is in that first frame, you can even set it to 1/1000th of a second so only Outlook users will see it, or you can use the snippet of code below to show a separate static image to Outlook users:

<!--[if !mso]><!-->
  <img src="Image.gif" alt="GIF for all email clients">
<!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if mso]>
  <img src="Image.jpg" alt="Static image for Outlook">
<![endif]-->

The above code uses mso-comments that are specific to Outlook - I wrote a guide on them and created a tool to help create them on lessonsinemail.com.

GIFs don’t need to be a large hero image, though.

We added this simple animation to the footer of our EmailWeekly newsletter to add a little bit of fun to an otherwise static footer.

It doesn’t need to be glaringly obvious.

Similar to the footer mentioned in the section above, this collection of small icons in a PizzaExpress (UK Pizza chain) email adds a subtle bit of interaction (plus some intrigue) and really draws attention and clicks by adding an animation when a user hovers.

Another great use of this could be for buttons or links - like this example from Litmus Weekly:

Support-wise, hover is widely supported by desktop email clients and the CSS to create a simple change to some attributes on hover is quite short:

.button:hover {
  background-color: red;
}

Add the pseudo selector :hover after the class you have assigned to your button and edit the styles!

I always like to quote Mark Robbins when someone asks me what interactivity in email looks like:

“An action taken in an email that triggers an event without leaving that email.”

Not leaving the email to go to a landing page or alternate version, but something happening then and there in the inbox.

We use this to surprise and delight users, but also know they are not expecting it, so we ensure there are some pointers on what to do.

I always like to share the example of a ‘tap/click to reveal’ as the starting point for anyone looking to get into interactive email use or development. I have a full code example on my interactive email code Github repo - so you have some code to start with, but essentially, you have something to click on and something appears!

You can expand on that as much as you like, by adding progressive enhancements, such as spinning, fading in, or just appearing below the content you clicked on.

We took this concept and created a spinning Pokémon card in 3d to really show off a new piece of card artwork:

Whilst you are happily coding away a tap to reveal for your next email (I see you Email Geeks 👀), you will also need to think about anyone who doesn’t see the interactive version of your email - or the default version.

Why the default and not the ‘fallback’ as it is often called?

Well, we started with that mindset, but soon realised that you should start by designing and coding for the email client with the least support for features, then you can add progressive enhancements until you have the all-singing and dancing interactive version.

Now that I have wet your appetite for bringing your emails to life, I want to share a couple of inspiring emails - one award-winning Bluey wedding invite email and the second, the latest Walking with Dinosaurs email.

These combine a bunch of techniques to really make email immersive!

Enjoy your coding journey!

Jay

P.S. Don’t forget to check out Jay’s brilliant tools and sign up for his Email Dev newsletter before you head out!

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

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Inspired to expand on your email design yet?

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Your friend in email,

Des