You may already be familiar with Google's AMP and its affiliation with website pages. If not, no worries. We'll go over exactly what AMP is, what its history is, and where it's going now.
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it is essentially Google's way to make it easier to access webpages from their search engine results. AMP pages load faster and easier, making it more user-friendly to navigate to a website and improving user experience with the search engine giant.
This is currently an open source technology that Google invites people to help improve, and Google is now extending the capabilities to Gmail.
What Is AMP for Email?
While the initial AMP capabilities were meant to make search engine results pages quicker to load, AMP for Email does the same thing for landing pages that users click on through the Gmail app. In essence, it drastically decreases the amount of time it takes to load a link clicked from an email newsletter. Remember, it's all about user experience. The faster a page loads, the better the experience.
Furthermore, it helps to make the emails themselves even more dynamic and interactive. Imagine being able to include components like surveys, RSVPs, and more that don't require the users to even click to an external site.
This increases the options that businesses have for email marketing and really opens the doors to even more dynamic options in the future. Imagine being able to send videos for your email subscribers to watch in real time, directly from their inbox.
Why Is AMP important?
Although different marketers have different opinions on AMP as a whole, we believe it really is a positive option for businesses to utilize. After all, what could be negative about faster loading time and better user experience?
The biggest impact is that businesses have to integrate their websites (and soon their emails) with the AMP interface. However, this new venture with AMP for Email will make marketers even more apt to take the plunge. The options that dynamic emails could potentially bring are huge.
During the initial beta that Google has launched with G-Suite subscribers, it already has RSVP and shopping options available in-email. This means that users can buy products directly from email newsletters without having to even go to the company's website. The e-commerce options that this opens up are extremely exciting.
This is why AMP is so important. It's helping to bring digital marketing even further forward. It's going to make the jobs of marketers easier (think of the tracking pixels and reporting you won't need if products can be bought directly in emails sent out) and the experience for shoppers and email subscribers even more interactive and beneficial.
How Can AMP for Email Be Used?
So now that we've covered some of the basics, let's dive into a few specific ways that AMP for Email can be utilized. These new developments are very exciting, and we love seeing them in use so far.
Pinterest
Pinterest is a visual social media platform that is great for driving website traffic and selling products. Users save pins to different boards on their profile to access later, and a large percentage of users are on the platform specifically for shopping.
Google has created dynamic code for an email that literally places an active Pinterest feed in a newsletter. Users can now access pins and save them to their own boards directly from their email within their inbox. Cool, right?
Booking.com
Yet another great way to use dynamic AMP for Email is to show multiple thumbnails for a single listing. This is how Booking.com has taken advantage of the new feature. They'll send out open listings to their email list, and instead of having to click to the listing's page, users can navigate between photos directly from the email.
Another way Booking.com is using AMP for Email is by allowing users to refresh the deals they find in their newsletter. Take a look at the screenshot below. Users can simply click "See a new deal" and immediately have a new listing option auto-populate within the email, rather than opening a webpage.
Furthermore, Booking.com has also added a dynamic subscription manager directly into their emails. As every email newsletter must include some type of opt-out to be CAN-SPAM compliant, they've taken theirs a step further.
They've included a "Manage your subscription" dropdown so that users can automatically decrease their subscription amount or opt-out straight from their inbox.
Ecwid
Another way that these new capabilities have been utilized is with the initial opt-in for an email subscription. Ecwid, an e-commerce for small businesses company, has shown ways they're using AMP for Email with e-commerce for their own clients, but they're even using it in a very clever way for their own newsletter.
When users subscribe to their email list, Ecwid sends out a double confirmation email. Whereas in most cases, users would click the "opt-in" button and be taken to a confirmation page, the dynamic AMP actually confirms opt-ins directly in the email.
Each of these new features is going to really start to change the face of email marketing. Right now, email marketing capabilities really are limited, but AMP for Email is a game changer. The biggest con is that it requires a good knowledge of code to create and implement these interactive features. You can check out what the code for the Pinterest board looks like here.
However, as more and more developers work on and adopt these new dynamic options, they will become more readily available for marketers and business owners. To learn more about what we can do for your email marketing, contact us today. We'd love to talk options, both dynamic and stationary.
Written By: David Carpenter
