How the travel business will benefit from AMP for Email. What is AMP for Email ? For the past few years, we’ve worked to make mobile pages load faster through an open-source framework called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP started as an effort to help publishers, but as its capabilities have expanded over time, it’s now one of the best ways to build rich webpages. With this came the opportunity to modernize one of the most popular places where people spend their time: email.
Thus far, email content has been primarily static. The user cannot engage with it other than to read, watch, or click through. With AMP for email, dynamic content allows for more versatile engagement, like form submission, for example.
AMP for Email is currently exclusively available for Gmail users. While Gmail is one of the most popular email clients with 26% of all emails opened in a Gmail inbox, on average, the audience for consumers that could see AMP-powered emails is limited. And it could be lower depending on your own audience. 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? Offering hotels, flights and holiday packages through an email newsletter channel has been a challenge in the travel business as customer satisfaction can be very cumbersome. By the time a newsletter subscriber opens the email, it is likely that hotel prices have changed or flights are already sold out. The travel seeker has to leave the email realm and is forced to visit the travel agencies’ website to check prices and availability again. In such cases, the traveler is also tempted to involve another travel provider in the search. With the launch of Google AMP for Email, however, that information and usability gap can now be closed, eventually leading to a higher ROI for the whole travel industry in email marketing. 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 supports Schema.org within Outlook and calls its support for the semantic markup ‘Actionable Messages‘. Those actionable messages enable you to take quick actions right from within Outlook. It is already fully supported in all recent desktop Outlook versions and Outlook Web Access and according to Microsoft, the new feature is coming to Outlook for Mac and Outlook Mobile soon as well.
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 extra on email marketing trends at https://emailinnovations.com/events-directory/.
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.