Email marketing news : The Email is being AMP’ed

Posted by Patrick Moreau on May 8, 2019 in Internet

AMP for Email use in travel business. What is AMP for Email ? In February 2018, Gmail announced native support for dynamic and interactive emails powered by AMP—an open-source technology from Google that’s designed to improve the performance of web content, in particular on mobile devices. Using a separate MIME-type, marketers will be able to leverage AMP to add interactivity to their emails.

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: Tracking may be limited: Tracking is crucial to optimization. Currently, marketers can track opens, clicks, etc. to improve campaigns. When you add to the list of actions users can take, you also add to what marketers must to track. Will there be ways to track them?

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. Save website bandwith: Especially during seasonal peaks (i.e. winter holidays) booking websites tend to reach their request limits rather quickly. AMP-based emails will help to keep your customer busy and up-to-speed even if the website is down or slow.

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.

Microsoft provides an Email Development Dashboard to test their Schema.org enriched ‘actionable messages’ for the Outlook product range. Using Microsoft’s Card Playground, you are able to test sending actionable messages to your own inbox.

A quite similar process is necessary if you want to see the Microsoft Outlook way of Schema.org implemention in action. You must go through through Microsoft’s registration and verification process before you can use the actionable messages in Outlook: Microsoft’s email sender guidelines. Schema.org is primarily used in Gmail and Outlook, summing up to a substantial email client market share in the business world. However, it can be speculated, though, that these enhancements will drive innovation even further, also affecting other email service global players and their email clients such as Apple Mail. Read more on email marketing trends at Actionable Emails using Schema.org.

While marketers are excited about getting started with AMP for email, we have to wait for ESP support. And right now, the majority of ESPs are showing no signs of supporting AMP’s MIME-type. This situation may feel familiar to email marketers. In May 2015, the new Apple watch MIME-type was released, which still has almost no support from ESPs.

It’s vital for marketers to know how well their email campaigns perform. Currently, marketers can use a range of analytics software and email metrics to get all sorts of engagement and revenue data from their email campaigns.

Email is about to become more useful and interactive – or even more annoying and distracting, depending on how you look at it – thanks to Google’s new AMP for Email project. Essentially, the search giant is seeking to save people who get lost in the rabbit hole that is their smartphone. You know when you’re reading something on your phone and after clicking around for a few minutes you think to yourself, “what app am I in again?” And then it turns out you’re not actually reading that article in Safari – you’re in Facebook.