AMP for Email use in travel business. What is AMP for Email ? Let’s start with the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. It’s an open source framework that, according to Google, “provides a straightforward way to create web pages that are compelling, smooth, and load near instantaneously for users.” Basically, AMP pages are stripped back versions of web pages that let users interact and read articles without having to wait. How do they achieve this? A key feature of AMP is the removal of JavaScript, which can slow down the rendering of pages. Instead, lightweight AMP libraries deliver common functionality like carousels and lightboxes.
Thus far, email content has been primarily static. The user cannot engage with it other than to read, watch, or click through. With AMP for email, dynamic content allows for more versatile engagement, like form submission, for example.
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? With AMP for Email, the benefits in email marketing for travel agencies and booking portals are huge. Here are some interesting examples how the travel business can significantly benefit from more dynamic emails in their email newsletter campaigns: Real-time: Show only selected products based on their real-time availability and up-to-date pricing. Even if the email recipient opens the email a day or two later, it will then show those products available and at the price at that specific moment in time. Basically: With every email open, quite possibly, the information rendered in that email can change.
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.
Many such improvements have inspired other email services such as Outlook.com, Yahoo and mail.ru to adopt those email innovations into their services as well. Gmail’s implementation of Schema.org is as of today the most comprehensive.
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 at Actionable Emails using Schema.org.
Email marketers already use two different MIME types to create emails for the HTML part (text/html) and plain-text part (text/plain) of an email. This is why, in your ESP, you have to create an HTML version and a plain-text version of every email you send. For AMP-powered emails, you’ll have to add a third MIME-type to your email. And that’s the problem: Without ESPs adding support for this third MIME-type, there is physically no way of creating and sending AMP-powered emails.
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.