Retailers looking to boost impressions and sales during the holiday season should consider using interactive email features, especially countdown timers, industry leaders say. Interactive features in marketing emails are winning a greater share of email impressions, especially during the holidays, according to Validity data.

• Countdown timers account for 64% of interactive feature impressions over the last year, up from 53% in the preceding year (2024-2025), according to Validity’s analysis.
• And 44% of all impressions from interactive email features occur in Q4, according to Validity data.

Using countdown timers

Retailers can gain impressions through the holiday and engage holiday shoppers with a countdown animation. 

“As you go through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, lots of the deals are time-sensitive and time-specific,” said Guy Hanson, vice president of customer engagement for Validity. “[The call to action might be] that in six hours this deal’s not going to be there anymore, and you’re drawing attention to that.”

Email countdown animations tailored for the holiday season could include many key dates like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the last day to order from retailers to guarantee shipping before Christmas. Retailers can use animations that show customers how long they have until these key dates, or for other special timeframes the retailer chooses.

Many email marketers push the urgency into the subject line, often with a clock icon or similar imagery, according to Hanson.

However, there is a risk that some customers won’t read the email until after the deadline has expired, in which case the user might delete the email or flag it as spam.

“All of those actions are sending out negative signals to the mailbox providers like Microsoft and Gmail, then your deliverability gets harder,” said Hanson. “So anything you can do to call your subscribers’ attention to engage with this email before the offer expires, rather than coming across it after it has expired, helps to mitigate sending those negative signals to the providers.”

Image carousels

The image carousel is another interactive feature gaining traction for email marketers, and it pays off for retailers in particular. One email can carry multiple products instead of one.

• Image carousels have nearly doubled their share to 9% of interactive impressions in the previous 12 months, up from 5% in the preceding year, according to Validity data.
• Direct-to-consumer leads other businesses with 38.3% of marketers in the category using animated features in emails this year, up 1.6 percentage points from 2025.

“Obviously, it gives the advertising brands the opportunity to showcase more inventory within a limited piece of real estate,” said Hanson. But this feature can also boost performance when customers click through. “It gives more time for purchase consideration in the email, meaning by the time your subscriber does click through, they’re probably more primed to convert. There is greater intent behind the click-through when it happens.”

AI email summaries

Some marketers might be wary of using big images and interactive elements in messaging now that AI-powered email summaries are integrated into more mailbox experiences, according to Hanson.

“The best practice guideline is if the AI bots are going to be scanning your emails, they’re looking for text,” he said. “They’re not going to be producing their summaries from images. There is an intentional thought process from email marketers, if that’s the case, we should probably be putting less images into our emails.”

However, the situation is complicated. A large segment of consumers either always open an email before deciding to purchase (35%), or haven’t noticed AI summaries in their inbox at all (31%), according to a June Validity survey.

“Are we at a stage where email subscribers are no longer engaging with their emails because the email summaries are telling them everything they need to know?” Hanson asked. “No. Around two-thirds… proceed to open up their email. Then all that functionality remains completely valid.”

This holiday season, interactive features will shape purchase decisions for the many subscribers who still open their emails.