How the travel industry will develop more with 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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
As an innovation leader, you should be amongst the first in your realm to implement Schema.org into your email marketing toolbox, allowing you to be seen as a technology leader in your field. Moreover, it allows you to enhance your email marketing platform with necessary enhancements and changes required to fully being able to deliver the additonal semantic markup code. See extra on email marketing trends on https://emailinnovations.com/how-the-travel-industry-will-benefit-from-amp-for-email/.
Clearly, marketers are excited about the prospect of leveraging AMP to easily create interactive experiences for their audiences. For a long time, interactive email has been seen as a technique that only large brands with extensive development and design resources can execute on. AMP for Email could make creating interactive email more accessible for all marketers, especially those with lots of Gmail users among their subscribers.
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.
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.
