How the travel business will benefit from AMP for Email. What is AMP for Email ? For the past few years, we’ve worked to make mobile pages load faster through an open-source framework called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP started as an effort to help publishers, but as its capabilities have expanded over time, it’s now one of the best ways to build rich webpages. With this came the opportunity to modernize one of the most popular places where people spend their time: email.
One of the most frequently asked questions about AMP for email is: Can you do all the things with AMP for email that you can with AMP? The answer is “no.” However, AMP email is far less constrained than traditional email. And while you can’t use ALL of AMP’s commands in Gmail, you can still create a highly rich user experience.
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. 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. See extra details on AMP for Email use in the travel industry.
While marketers are excited about getting started with AMP for email, we have to wait for ESP support. And right now, the majority of ESPs are showing no signs of supporting AMP’s MIME-type. This situation may feel familiar to email marketers. In May 2015, the new Apple watch MIME-type was released, which still has almost no support from ESPs.
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.
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.