The Email is being AMP’ed

Travel industry news : newsletters with AMP for E-mail. What is AMP for Email ? AMP for email is another way for marketers to leverage the speed of the accelerated mobile pages framework. In the official release on the AMP blog, Product Manager of Gmail and Chat, Aakash Sahney, calls it a powerful way for developers to create more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.

One of the most frequently asked questions about AMP for email is: Can you do all the things with AMP for email that you can with AMP? The answer is “no.” However, AMP email is far less constrained than traditional email. And while you can’t use ALL of AMP’s commands in Gmail, you can still create a highly rich user experience.

While AMP for email brings revolutionary potential to a powerful medium, not everyone’s convinced it’ll be for the better. In a blog post for Litmus, Jain Mistry outlines a few problems the technology may face: It may confuse users: The problem with completely changing the way we use email is that it could potentially be too much too soon.

What are the benefits in Email Marketing for the Travel Industry? In the travel industry, especially for travel agencies and online travel booking portals, email marketing is the most important direct communication channel for getting in touch with their customers. There already plenty of good reasons to use email as your number one channel. But email is lacking dynamic elements. The recipient has to be referred to a website in order to perform further action. However, this technological gap is going to be closed rather soon with Google’s AMP for Email. More effective A/B testing: Running email campaigns in variable segments required a large test group and a delay for the other groups. With dynamic emails, however, these tests can performed with all first opener recipients until a threshold is reached. Eventually lowering complexity and time consumption for A/B testing to a minimum. Moreover, A/B testing will have an immediate impact on all future opens of every email.

Schema.org is a markup vocabulary for structured data founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It is actively maintained by an open community process. In search engine optimization (SEO), Schema.org is commonly used as additional semantic markup inside web pages to help making a website’s search result snippets stand out and eventually perform better. It is also used in other popular forms of structured data in digital marketing, for instance in Facebook’s Open Graph and in Twitter Cards. In Email Marketing, however, Schema.org is still a ‘secret weapon’ that helps you to stand out from regular emails sent by your competitors.

With Google Apps Script, Google for example provides a free service for interacting with user data, other internal as well as external systems. You can use Apps Script to test your markup by sending yourself an email including schemas.

In order to see your Schema.org implementation in effect on Gmail, you must go through a registration and verification process with Google before you can use email markup in Gmail. You must meet Google’s email sender quality guidelines. Apart from DKIM or SPF verification (which should be no problem for you as a legite sender for your email domain), you must also make sure to send out at least a hundred emails per day to Gmail users from your sending platform constantly for a few weeks before applying. This way, Google makes sure to see that you are trustworthy, requiring you to not have any or only a very low rate of spam complaints from Gmail recipients. See extra on email marketing trends at https://emailinnovations.com/the-email-is-being-amp-ed/.

But marketers’ excitement isn’t the only factor that will influence the adoption of AMP for Email. In fact, there are some major hurdles that might hinder marketers from even getting started with creating AMP-powered emails. Creating interactive emails using AMP for Email isn’t as simple as creating an HTML email. AMP for Email requires a third, separate MIME-type: text-x-amphtml.

Marketers often wish they could update the content of an email after it’s been sent to correct a mistake or refresh an offer. With AMP-powered emails, marketers will be able to do just that. But, the question is, should they be able to? Updating an email post-send could be troubling or confusing from a subscriber perspective. A medium known to consumers as a static one turns into a dynamic feed that the sender can change as they please. Imagine opening the same email once, twice, and then a third time expecting to find the same content and not? It’s a tactic that may lead to losing trust among your subscribers—a valuable commodity in email marketing.

But not everyone is convinced we need this. TechCrunch says it’s a terrible idea “borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage rather than user needs.” Ouch. To help you make your own mind up, this article will cover some of the key information you need to know about working with the new AMP for Email spec, its potential for modernizing email, and possible use cases for designers, marketers and content creators.