The idea

If you’re one of the lucky subscribers to receive our agency newsletter Email Weekly, you’ll no doubt have seen our Halloween email sent out in October.

The goal of this special edition was to create more than just a fun email read—but a fully immersive experience.

This was all about elevating creativity and pushing the boundaries of interactivity, as we attempted to couple the spooky realms of Halloween with AI.

It was important that this experience took our readers on an actual journey;

involving our team to be bold with their creative ideation, utilizing cutting-edge tools and carefully crafting the best language to bring this spooky scene to life.

As with any of our solus creatives, it began with the team putting their heads together to think of a theme, a narrative, or just something they’d like to test.

Hannah had an idea of the email being based around a haunted room, and this is where we got to work!

The design approach

To help with our sending schedule we opted to leverage Stable Diffusion AI, a deep learning text-to-image model for our asset and image creation process.

We approached this carefully as we had to consider our choice of words to yield the desired outcomes.

Some prompts triggered subtle modifications within the image, while others completely changed its composition dramatically transforming the image.

The biggest challenge at this design stage was enhancing the quality of low-resolution, blurry images, ensuring they appeared sharp and clear across various devices.

To address this, the images underwent a transformation through an AI upscaling platform known as "Pixelcut." This platform leverages advanced machine learning techniques to predict and add the necessary pixels, enhancing the resolution without compromising the overall image quality.

We combined these generated images with Adobe Firefly within Photoshop, another image generation tool.

This approach allowed us to manipulate different sections of the image and layer them together to craft the perfect scene for our email.

How we built it

The code from the email is an evolution of a “tap to reveal” style interactive module.

We essentially chained several “tap to reveal”s together, with a tap on the answer revealing the next clue and the hidden tap zone for the next answer.

These tap zones were then placed in an absolutely positioned div, overlaying the image and placed accordingly.

We also added a delayed animation that gave the tap zones a slight pulsing glow after a few seconds, so as to give the player a bit of a hint if they got stuck.

The copy

When it came to crafting the copy for this interactive email experience, there was a big opportunity to put a spin on our usual tone of voice.

Inspired by the devilishly good creative executions, our talented copywriter wrote a series of spooky riddles in order to move the recipient around each scene.

Taking reference from old Victorian Mansions and classic horror stories.

Each line became a cryptic invitation, encouraging readers to find various clues hidden within the email's interactive features.

A bit of creative freedom is often the dream scenario for a copywriter, and in this particular case - a great way to not only engage our subscribers, but also showcase the versatility of our brand's storytelling.

The final look…

In a symphony of creativity, we've not only pushed the boundaries of traditional email but embarked on a fully immersive journey where the spooky allure of Halloween meets the rapidly growing world of AI.

Enter, if you dare - into our own idea of innovation and fear!