If you are active on social media or purchased anything online, then I am guessing you already get tons of emails every single day. And even if you don’t believe in shopping online, I can bet you still get several promotional emails. And this is the reason, email marketing has created its reputation as a spammy in the minds of many. It was not long ago when experts used to believe that the days for email marketing are numbered. They thought soon, it would become a dated concept… But hey, it’s over 2 decades of the 21st century and to everyone’s surprise, email marketing is not yet dead. I repeat email marketing is not dead!!
You might consider it spammy, but the truth is, “more than 293 billion emails were sent in 2019 only (- Statista)”. According to a survey done by DMA.org.uk, the average return was $42 on every $1 spent on email marketing.
Truth is that it is still the most effective form of digital marketing. And to make it more effective, Google has recently announced to implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) platform to email. It really has the potential to convert boring, plain HTML-based emails into more engaging, interactive & actionable emails. Already some of the popular Omnichannel Marketing Automation Services like eSputnik are providing services like AMP-powered emails. Companies like eSputnik are using interactive and effective email marketing to manage cross-channel messaging campaigns via Email, SMS, Web Push, Mobile Push, Viber, WhatsApp, and other instant messengers for their clients.
Coming back to this concept, initially, AMP was developed by Google with the aim of improving the performance of the mobile web significantly. It is good for providing rich content like graphics, videos, and animation for smart ads, and can also help them to load faster. Majorly, this concept relies on “AMP HTML” which is nothing but a new kind of open framework built completely from existing web technologies. AMP allows websites to build light-weight web pages that are more engaging and attractive.
What Is an AMP for Email?
AMP is a revolutionary technology that helps all the digital marketers to add various elements like accordions, purchase buttons, carousels, confirmation, questionnaires, survey and so on in the email itself. These interactive emails don’t require users to open any other application for completing the desired action.
Usually, AMP enables you to use JavaScript kind of functionality without using JavaScript. It is particularly useful in creating dynamic emails for the subscribers when all the email clients block JavaScript. You can use all the features of AMP in your email by just embedding AMP in an email message body as a new MIME part – text-x-amphtml – that is later rendered by all email clients.
Going by the trends, this concept has already shaken the entire email marketing domain which initially was more dependent on basic, old HTML standards. Now it powers all the marketers to exploit the speed of AMP framework for making their emails more actionable, engaging and interactive.
Why Does AMP for Email Have so Much potential?
Depending upon your views, all the marketing emails are now set to become more interactive, efficient & useful; or even distracting & annoying for some. All thanks to AMP technology announced by Google.
The search giant of this internet age, Google is ready to save all those people who often get lost in their smartphone. Suppose you are doing something on your phone & after a few clicks, you found questioning yourself what app I am in? Then you realize that since the last few minutes, you’re not actually doing your primary tasks. In reality, you might be on some e-commerce website or some other applications.
To avoid these situations, Google brought AMP for email that allows users to keep in your email. It prevents you from shuffling through different applications of your smartphone by providing all the necessary options in the email only.
For instance, when you receive an email regarding any offer, instead of taking you to the respective applications, this technology will provide you all the necessary actions inside your email only.
Here’s another widely popular use case of AMP for Email for Pinterest users. Suppose you get an email from Pinterest & instead of going to the Pinterest application or your browser, with AMP, you can use Pinterest from that email only.
With all this, one question that comes in every mind is, “What really you can achieve from AMP-based emails?” Truly, AMP makes email more interactive for the subscribers but still, you can’t do everything using this technology.
However, using AMP in mails makes you less constrained than any traditional mails, and even you can’t use all its commands in Gmail for providing a highly user rich experience to the subscribers.
Read More: How to Apply for Sending AMP-Powered Emails within Gmail?
How AMP-Based Email Is Different From HTML Email?
AMP emails are similar to any HTML email but with more advanced capabilities. Unlike regular HTML email, AMP-powered email has a limited JavaScript markup for adding AMP elements.
Currently, email service providers don’t support all the JavaScript capabilities in an HTML-based email. They carefully limit and control the library of JavaScript. But some of the top email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook & Mail.ru support AMP technology for emails. This means that now, unlike any regular HTML-based email, you can use and incorporate all the elements or the features of AMP elements into the emails for the majority of the subscribers from your email lists.
Some of the commonly supported AMP components are amp-selector, amp-carousel, amp-bind, amp-img, amp-image-lightbox, amp-sidebar, amp-form, amp-fit-text, amp-anim, amp-list, amp-timago, amp-accordion, and amp-state.
Read More: 3 Email Marketing Automation Workflows for 2019
Benefits of Using AMP for Email
1. Safe & Secure
The best part of AMP is that it doesn’t have any features from the 3rd party that can limit security issues. It can easily surpass the capabilities that any 3rd party provides. Moreover, you can’t find any ad components that give additional security to users. It only allows a conservative subset of AMP functionality for maintaining the expectations of users regarding their privacy & security.
2. Consistency & Scalability
You can embed AMP within the email without any hassle by just adding a new MIME part with a content type of text/x-amp-html as a descendant of multipart/alternative. Make sure that it lives along with existing text/plain or html parts for ensuring that emails are working on every client.
3. Increased in-mail Capabilities
Using AMP in email significantly enhances the capabilities of the senders by providing various components. You can use these components to create engaging, dynamic, rich & interactive emails. It not only allows users to engage with content immediately but also aids them to take action like filling out forms, content personalization, RSVP to clients & others. Lastly, AMP-based emails are up-to-date and can also require fewer clicks to achieve the required results.
4. Interactive Customer Experience
Some of the capabilities of using AMP for email also empowers users to take action directly from the inbox by using accordions, carousels, questionnaires, user input forms & others.
5. Increased Personalization
Since customers can directly take action within their email, this technology helps the sender to provide efficient & smarter user interaction. It assists in responding to polls, bookings, managing subscriptions & doodles. It is only possible because of the fact that the server retrieves fresh content every single time from remote endpoints. It keeps your email up-to-date.
6. Improved & Smarter Device
AMP also provides attractive options regarding any subscriber-list emails or promotional emails. You can increase customer satisfaction by several folds by using its smarter engagement features like subscription management, hassle-free feedback or any other all within the inbox.
Wrap Up!!
A few years back, many might have believed the fact that email marketing will be dead in no-time but it is still one of the go-to options for several digital marketers from all over the world. Whether it is a small startup or big organizations like Amazon, everyone uses some kind of marketing or promotions via emails.
Indeed, for many, it might be spam, but hey, to overcome this & to make emails more action-oriented, Google came up with the implementation of AMP concept in the emails too. Definitely this move by Google has lightened up the days of a myriad of digital marketers. And if you are still unable to deal with the technicality of AMP then, of course, there are email service providers like eSputnik & others that will help you in designing and sending AMP-powered emails to all the subscribers without any hassle.
