Travel industry developments : newsletters with AMP for E-mail. What is AMP for Email ? AMP for email is another way for marketers to leverage the speed of the accelerated mobile pages framework. In the official release on the AMP blog, Product Manager of Gmail and Chat, Aakash Sahney, calls it a powerful way for developers to create more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.
Like Doodle, Booking.com takes advantage of AMP’s dynamic content to deliver users a better experience in email. In this case, it relates to their search for lodging. As you see in this first email, Booking.com offers its users a room recommendation with an image. But, one thumbnail? That’s hardly all you need to see to decide on a room, but unlike static email, which would force you to click through to the listing page to see the photos of this apartment, AMP for email allows the user to click the arrow on the edge of the image to slide to the next photo, seen below, The user gets a more informed view of the listing without ever having to leave the email. While an email slider like this can be created with CSS, it’s been called a far smoother experience with AMP for email.
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. 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. Read more details at How the travel industry will evolve with AMP for Email.
To better understand marketers’ thoughts on AMP for Email, we polled over a thousand marketers on whether they’ve heard of AMP for Email, and if they had any plans on using it. Of those that did know what AMP for Email was, 31% said they were very likely to use it.
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.