Travel industry news : newsletters with AMP for E-mail. What is AMP for Email ? AMP for Email will make it possible to take simple actions (like booking a calendar appointment or RSVP-ing an event) directly within the layout of the email – users can interact with content without leaving the Gmail client and without visit a website.
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. It may confuse users: The problem with completely changing the way we use email is that it could potentially be too much too soon.
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: Save website bandwith: Especially during seasonal peaks (i.e. winter holidays) booking websites tend to reach their request limits rather quickly. AMP-based emails will help to keep your customer busy and up-to-speed even if the website is down or slow.
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.
Using Schema.org in Gmail for RSVP Actions as shown above can be used to respond directly within the email inbox realm (without leaving the email web or client interface). In this example the user can respond directly to an event invitation inside the inbox. It renders the action by showing all the details of the event including ‘Yes‘, ‘No‘, and ‘Maybe‘ responses which can be defined by the sender.
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. See extra on email marketing trends on https://emailinnovations.com/events-directory/.
But marketers’ excitement isn’t the only factor that will influence the adoption of AMP for Email. In fact, there are some major hurdles that might hinder marketers from even getting started with creating AMP-powered emails. Creating interactive emails using AMP for Email isn’t as simple as creating an HTML email. AMP for Email requires a third, separate MIME-type: text-x-amphtml.
Email developers have long craved the kind of coding standardization that the web has had for years. Despite efforts from the email community, that standardization still hasn’t happened. AMP-powered emails rely on client-specific coding—again, it’s only supported by Gmail. That is another step away from email coding standardization, and will require email developers to learn another specific skill set in order to simply build an email.
Now that you know what AMP is, you can probably imagine how AMP for Email might work. Essentially, it brings the power of AMP into email and, like AMP, offers JavaScript-like functionality for creating dynamic emails without actually using JavaScript. This is particularly useful since all email clients block Javascript by default – AMP offers a limited alternative to JavaScript without having to use arbitrary code in email. The AMP for Email spec is proposing to do all this by allowing email publishers to embed AMP directly in a message body as a new MIME part – text-x-amphtml – which would be rendered by email clients (with a fallback to non-AMP content). The proposed name for this particular project is “AMPHTML Email.”