When Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) powered emails earlier this year, it was like a breath of fresh air for the email marketing industry.
AMP-powered emails are set to revolutionize the way email marketing has been done all these years. Currently AMP launched by Google is going through developer testing phase and hence has been adopted by only a handful of brands like Booking.com and Pinterest. But soon enough, ESPs as well brands are going to catch up.
Let’s dive into understanding how AMP-powered emails are set to impact the deliverability of your email campaigns, and hence your email marketing strategy.
What is AMP?
AMP is a technology to create a faster and more interactive way of rolling out web pages on mobile devices. AMP for Email – an expansion of AMP project will include dynamic emails. It will support useful and interactive content within email to provide a refreshing and a modern experience.
AMP powered Emails will allow “rich engaging emails, making modern app functionality available within email.”
Web technologies have evolved greatly in the last two decades. Communication channels like app push notifications and web push notifications have gained traction and soared ahead in terms of popularity. Email design, on the other hand, has lagged behind.
The developers who design beautiful email templates for their brand’s email campaigns have been doing it the old fashioned way since its inception. GIFs, video in email and other techniques to get dynamic content within the email have evolved only in the last 5 years.
Yet, email still remains as one of the most engaging channels of marketing communication.
How Does AMP Email Work?
Currently, most promotional email campaigns work like this:
A user receives a promotional offer email from a brand, and if he is interested in the offer, he clicks the link, gets redirected to the product page on the website, and carries on with the transaction on the website.
The chances of the user clicking the link, and continuing with the transaction on the website are bleak. Thanks to the extremely short attention spans!
With AMP Emails, there will be a change in the way users will engage with brands, as all the interactions will happen within the email client itself without needing him to be redirected elsewhere!
For instance, you just recently used a travel portal for making your hotel booking. The portal sends you an email regarding a hotel feedback survey. With AMP powered emails you can fill out the survey on your email itself, without getting redirected to the travel site. That’s cool right?
Here’s what your users would be able to do with AMP-powered emails:
- scroll image carousels
- add items to the shopping cart
- fill up a form or a questionnaire
- open a product card, choose and buy the products
- participate in surveys or polls right in the inbox
- reply to comments in an email
AMP for email will make dynamic content like videos, GIFs, graphics available on your email client in a moment to browse and interact with! With AMP operational, users can easily RSVP to an event, browse a catalogue of an online store, fill out a form without leaving your email client. The feature is being rolled out in Gmail web client and then will be provided on mobile. With time, other ISPs like Yahoo, Outlook, and Mail.ru etc. will also support it.
Here are a few examples of how some brands are developing new experiences for consumers using AMP for Email.
AMP for Emails shall provide higher personalization as users would be able to take actions within the email itself. Also, the users can get the latest information (say comments, product reviews, etc.) from the website within the email.
What do you need to send AMP-powered email campaigns?
AMP can work only if the webpage content to be sent across email is created with a new MIME type HTML format – text-x-amp html. This format will be required to create “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.”
If you wish to send AMP powered emails, you will have to get your domain whitelisted at Gmail’s end and then send the mails through supported ESP’s only. The reason for this is, ESP’s will have to process the emails in new HTML format at the time of email generation.
For sending AMP Emails to your users, your settings need to be dedicated:
- Your Emails should pass SPF, DKIM, DMARC authentication
- Your email settings need to have a dedicated envelope.
- It is preferred that your sending domain reputation at Gmail postmaster should be at least medium to high. Low/bad reputation senders could be denied white-listing.
You can dig more about the prerequisites here.
What are the benefits of sending AMP-enabled emails?
Some of the new pathways AMP for email has to offer you are:
1. Increased time spent on email
This is the most important benefit for you. The more time spent users spend browsing and interacting with your email, the higher the chances of responding the offer. This will in turn benefit Gmail and other ISPs who will adapt to AMP emails and help the marketer in achieving their goals of conversions and brand engagement.
2. More engaging automated and promotional content
With instant call to actions now feasible on AMP, you can get more creative with designing email triggers fitting in your users in the various stages of the user life cycle. How about reducing that cart abandonment activity and designing your email in such a way that the user will be inclined to transact from his email client itself without any fuss?
3. Better customer experience
The content of the web pages being dynamic & interactive will allure the users to act. An improved user experience would lead to an improved affinity for your brand. This should also reduce the traffic flow on the website which used to drop in terms of transactions / signups as all this can be done easily hereupon in the Email itself.
After implementing AMP, Tokopedia – one of the largest E-commerce brands in Indonesia reached four important mobile milestones: a 5X jump in conversion rates, a 40% increase in organic traffic, 65% faster page load times, and a 60% lower bounce rate, which highlighted better engagement.
4. Higher SEO ranking
We already know that SEO ranking of links improve when they contain videos or any interactive content. As such with emergence of AMP, the SEO ranking for that brand which uses will be high and as such the other brands will be playing catch up, who haven’t yet embraced this new email feature.
5. Hyper-personalization of content
Now is the era of hyper-personalization in emails. With AMP for email, this will be taken to the highest level where your users’ choices can be met in the email itself. That means, subscribing to a service or agreeing to be part of an event or else choosing a product from a personally curated range of catalogue and transacting to secure the delivery. This will empower email marketers like you to design creatives in a more personalized way where a user can get everything done easily and quickly.
6. More engaging emails
Till now the content of emails has stayed static and small changes like introducing GIFs or videos inside the creative content have been limited. With AMP, the bar will be raised high in terms of the aesthetic value of the email. The website will also need to feature more dynamic and visually actionable content to tempt the users to choose from the products offered.
7. Improved security of user data
According to Google, there will be no 3rd party Ad features included inside the AMP emails. With all the recent brouhaha about data safety and security of the users, this will be a positive step taken by Google to ensure that browsing the email will be safe and there will be no privacy breach or safety concerns involved.
Points to Note
While AMP emails offer a whole lot of benefits, (read more here) there are some points that you need to consider:
Designing AMP emails requires a degree of developer’s coding skills. It requires a degree of coding hence, you need to upgrade the skill sets to be able to create these templates.
- The links for the AMP content point to Google URLs and users who click those links will not be pointed to your brand’s website. Since your users browse the email content and transact from the email client itself, it might lead to a drop in your website traffic.
- It is still an open question as to how Google Analytics will be tracking the email activity of the users and if yes how will they be going about it.
Will they be tracking the activity of which content is the intended customer spending the most time on or what links they are clicking on more often than others? So the questions about how the engagement will be measured, are yet to be answered
How will AMP affect Email Deliverability?
Well, this is the million dollar question!
Apart from domain and IP reputation, sending right content at the right time plays a major role in inboxing of the emails. If the engagement quotient of your emails is high (which is true in AMP emails owing to the interactive content), the deliverability rises automatically.
Also, AMP emails require all authentication settings passed and as such the emails will be high on compliance from all ISPs. This also would contribute in increasing the probability of these emails landing in the Inbox folder.
AMP has brought an exciting time for email. It is a huge leap for email marketers like you who are looking at creating attractive email designs to wow their customers. The static pages for emails and web pages will be replaced by useful and actionable content which will amplify the experience offered to the users. It will also prompt you to design more visually appealing and business-wise emails which will help you drive you brand’s popularity and ROI higher.
To know more about Smartech’s powerful email marketing platform, get in touch with us today!
Do you have any other predictions on AMP Emails and how they shall affect the email marketing world? Please leave your comments below.
