What Is AMP For Email?
(I orginally wrote this article for my former employer, Mailercloud)
In your fast-paced reality of technological ubiquity and multi-tasking habits, you often do not have time or the patience to visit a website, log in again or run an application just to check on a comment, or confirm an order. It might actually feel annoying if you had to do it multiple times in a day. So in 2016, Google launched AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages.
What is AMP for email?
It is an open-sourced library that helps to load websites and pages faster on mobiles. It had a significant impact on SEO and it was later introduced to emails. In emails, AMP combines real-time, up-to-date, dynamic, and interactive content into a personalized experience for each and every Gmail recipient’s inbox.
Emails have not changed much functionally over the last two or two and a half decades. You can still mainly insert texts, images, and links into an email body; something that you could also do in 1998. As compared to that, other web-based technologies have rocketed ahead in enabling interactive user experiences.
AMP aims to do the same for emails and give users an interactive, safe, and real-time experience. Owning to its inherent fast and secure nature, it was decided to bring AMP technology to email.
You can fill out questionnaires, browse catalogs, fill out RSVP forms, respond to comments and even share access to Google Sheets from within the email. Your emails will also be up to date with the latest recommendations and the latest comments.
How does AMP for email relate to email marketing?
AMP can mean different things to different people in the email marketing industry. For marketers, it means that a user does not reach a landing page, take a survey or even browse through your product. Instead, the user directly takes action in the email itself.
On the other hand, developers can customize styling easily via CSS3 and work on various AMP elements from carousels to update content. For an existing email, adding a new MIME part with the textual content in the HTML is sufficient.
Figuring the right email marketing strategy to keep customers glued to your product while giving them the fun of AMP will be challenging for both marketers and developers.
Are there any downsides to AMP for email?
AMP is a very new technology and a hasty introduction of it in your emails might be overwhelming for your customers. You have to see to it that its introduction in their inbox is not abrupt. Rather you should approach it through improvements that would seem intuitive-something that should have been there from the beginning. For instance, an option to swipe through photos of a room rental website in carousels without having to end up in a web browser. Since its content is dynamic it must be taken care of that the static nature of emails is not altered. Customers are at home with the static nature of emails- referring and keeping records from older emails, and therefore, dynamically updating and changing email might be a bane.
In addition to the issues of AMP I mentioned above, there are still MIME parts that are being deliberated on how to implement them strategically so that it increases the quality of a user's experience. At the moment there seems to be not much support for various essential components of HTML email development like the ing tag, inline style, and background attributes. Moreover, AMP is also not good with tracking campaign performance, yet.
Conclusion
AMP is a budding technology with an aim to enhance the quality of user experience in their inbox. It is definitely the edge that email technology badly needed for years to keep up with the dynamism of the rest of the internet. However, it still has unresolved issues and minor roadblocks. AMP needs more knowledge than HTML coding and it will be a challenge for developers, designers and marketers alike to ensure users an elevated email experience.
