Travel industry developments : newsletters with AMP for E-mail. 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.
The layout of traditional email is fairly rigid. AMP for email opens it up with elements like a carousel for media, lightboxes for images and text, and accordions for showing and hiding different sections.
AMP for Email is currently exclusively available for Gmail users. While Gmail is one of the most popular email clients with 26% of all emails opened in a Gmail inbox, on average, the audience for consumers that could see AMP-powered emails is limited. And it could be lower depending on your own audience. There’s little support from ESPs: Emails using AMP aren’t like traditional emails, so, they can’t be built the traditional way. If your email service provider can’t support the technology needed to create them, you may find yourself unable to.
What are the benefits in Email Marketing for the Travel Industry? In the travel industry, especially for travel agencies and online travel booking portals, email marketing is the most important direct communication channel for getting in touch with their customers. There already plenty of good reasons to use email as your number one channel. But email is lacking dynamic elements. The recipient has to be referred to a website in order to perform further action. However, this technological gap is going to be closed rather soon with Google’s AMP for Email. 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. Read more details at AMP for Email use in the travel industry.
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.
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.
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.
