AMP for Email applications in travel business. What is AMP for Email ? Today, we’re bringing the power of AMP to email through the Gmail Developer Preview of “AMP for Email.” This new spec will be a powerful way for developers to create more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.
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: It may confuse users: The problem with completely changing the way we use email is that it could potentially be too much too soon.
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. 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.
With Google Apps Script, Google for example provides a free service for interacting with user data, other internal as well as external systems. You can use Apps Script to test your markup by sending yourself an email including schemas.
In order to see your Schema.org implementation in effect on Gmail, you must go through a registration and verification process with Google before you can use email markup in Gmail. You must meet Google’s email sender quality guidelines. Apart from DKIM or SPF verification (which should be no problem for you as a legite sender for your email domain), you must also make sure to send out at least a hundred emails per day to Gmail users from your sending platform constantly for a few weeks before applying. This way, Google makes sure to see that you are trustworthy, requiring you to not have any or only a very low rate of spam complaints from Gmail recipients. Read more on email marketing trends on Actionable Emails using Schema.org.
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.
But not everyone is convinced we need this. TechCrunch says it’s a terrible idea “borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage rather than user needs.” Ouch. To help you make your own mind up, this article will cover some of the key information you need to know about working with the new AMP for Email spec, its potential for modernizing email, and possible use cases for designers, marketers and content creators.