Six years ago, Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve the loading speed of mobile websites and improve the subscriber experience.
The initial success of AMP resulted in an update that enables fast loading and interactive e-mails that emulate mail-enabled microsites.
This technology allows your subscribers to interact with an email without visiting the website or landing page. AMP emails allow filling out a form, answering a survey, or checking out to complete a purchase through the email itself.
AMP technology allows subscribers to interact with an # email without visiting a website or landing page, @imkevin_monk says of @CMIContent. Click to tweet
AMP email not only contributes to a better subscriber experience, it also brings more conversions and faster business growth. It does take some coding work. It’s most useful when most of your email subscribers are under the Gmail umbrella.
While there are worthwhile uses of AMP in email, others need to take it slow and take a step-by-step introduction. Since this is a tech-sensitive technology, it’s a good idea to segment your subscribers and send them to Gmail addressees at the beginning.
And one more caveat: you’ll need a different metric to evaluate success because AMP emails don’t track click-through rates.
Now let’s see how you can use AMP technology in your brand’s emails.
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Bookings
Your subscribers can check availability and book a ticket directly via email. You can let users scroll through the offers and complete the booking without redirecting them to the website landing page or mobile app.
See how Booking.com implemented this technology in their promotional email:
With Booking.com, the recipients can also manage their subscriptions in this email. That’s another great idea to incorporate AMP into your email.
shop
Using this email from Nest, the subscriber can add the products to their cart and checkout without ever having to visit their website:
If your subscribers fail to make the purchase, AMP can help you create an email about their cart abandonment and help them complete the purchase faster.
(Note: Nest runs email using AMP-like functionality, but not AMP source coding.)
Mini apps
With the help of AMP technology, companies can send an email simulating their mobile app.
With AMP technology, companies can # send emails simulating their mobile app, @imkevin_monk says of @CMIContent. Click to tweet
In this example from Pinterest, the user can save the pin and view the original image without opening the app or website:
Another great use of AMP in emails would be dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, or OkCupid. Users could swipe through the profiles in the email themselves, literally opening up new speed dating opportunities.
Long emails
Your newsletter may be filled with content – too much content for the subscriber to want to scroll all the way down.
In such cases, send an AMP email with an accordion. Take a look at this example from my company, Email Uplers. In addition to a slider, registration form, and contact form, we used an accordion to convey more in a limited space.
Invitations, surveys and quizzes
Your subscribers can reply directly to invitation emails using the AMP functionality. The simplicity should get subscribers to sign up for the event faster. While this looks like a promising application, many marketers still prefer the good old-fashioned way of getting registrations through the landing page rather than the email itself.
You can also invite your audience to take surveys and quizzes on social media. You must have expressed your opinion in multiple surveys on social media platforms, right? AMP has extended this functionality to e-mail.
AWeber sent out a survey using AMP emails to see if marketers would send out Black Friday or Cyber Monday email campaigns.
The same technique can be used to send a quiz, as shown in this example:
When the subscriber opens the email again, they’ll see the updated response percentages.
If AMP is not enabled in the subscriber’s inbox, they can be redirected to a landing page but they will not look for the dynamic breakdown of results.
Reservation: Use this feature only for recipients who are familiar with this type of technology and know that the content is trustworthy.
Calculator and tracking
AMP enables calculators to be integrated into e-mails. For example, marketers in the banking and finance industries can use monthly income (EMI) calculators. Recipients enter the loan amount and term to view the EMI.
AMP can also be used to track the status of the recipient’s package.
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A couple of technical things
The email technician on your team can surely help you create the perfect AMP email. To send an AMP email, you need to:
Last memory
Because AMP is complicated to code and time consuming to execute, people are reluctant to use it in their business. If you invest in the intricacies of encoding and time consuming execution for AMP email, make sure you have tested it for flawless rendering. If most of your subscribers aren’t using Gmail, have a suitable fallback email format in place.
Have you sent or are you planning to send AMP emails to your subscribers? Let us know in the comments.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute
