How the travel business will develop more with AMP for Email. 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.
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: For example: Dynamic content, while giving marketers the opportunity to keep their emails up-to-date after sending, could confuse users expecting static content. Mistry writes: “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.”
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. New booking experience: With AMP for Email, your subscribers can book right within the email without ever leaving it.
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 more on email marketing trends on 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.
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.