Posted by Patrick Moreau on March 27, 2019 in Travel
AMP for Email applications in travel industry. What is AMP for Email ? Let’s start with the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. It’s an open source framework that, according to Google, “provides a straightforward way to create web pages that are compelling, smooth, and load near instantaneously for users.” Basically, AMP pages are stripped back versions of web pages that let users interact and read articles without having to wait. How do they achieve this? A key feature of AMP is the removal of JavaScript, which can slow down the rendering of pages. Instead, lightweight AMP libraries deliver common functionality like carousels and lightboxes.
Interest in interactive email is high. At the beginning of 2018, marketers told Litmus that interactive email is the top email design trend of 2018, with more marketers expected to embrace interactive email techniques. AMP for Email, in theory, has the potential to bring email marketers a big step closer to their interactive email goals.
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: AMP for email only works in Gmail: Currently AMP for email is exclusive to Gmail. If your email list is primarily Gmail users, this may not be an issue. If it isn’t, you may have to create a non-AMP version of your email for non-Gmail users.
What are the benefits in Email Marketing for the Travel Industry? With AMP for Email, the benefits in email marketing for travel agencies and booking portals are huge. Here are some interesting examples how the travel business can significantly benefit from more dynamic emails in their email newsletter campaigns: Behavioral targeting: Based on a first email open the following email opens can already lead to a more accurate choice of products for the subscriber based on click behavior, opening time, device or spatial data. See more info at How the travel business will benefit from AMP for Email.
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.
However, it’s not clear how marketers will be able to track and report on AMP-powered emails. In interactive emails, much more of the engagement is happening within the inbox—whether it’s hovering over items in a carousel or clicking through a selection of deals—and none of these actions can be measured with traditional email marketing metrics. If marketers are keen to implement AMP-powered emails, it’s clear that they would need to rethink how email performance is captured and measured.
It’s safe to say, this project is going to shake up the email marketing space, which has wrestled with poor HTML standards support in many email clients (including Gmail and especially Outlook) for years as the rest of the web has embraced modern and interactive standards. While Gmail introduced better support for CSS in 2016, developing emails in 2018 still requires outdated tables and hacking code. So what does AMP for Email look like on the front-end? Imagine you get an email from Pinterest and you want to save a pin you see in your email to your actual Pinterest account. AMP for Email lets you do just that.