AMP for Email applications in travel industry. What is AMP for Email ? Let’s start with the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. It’s an open source framework that, according to Google, “provides a straightforward way to create web pages that are compelling, smooth, and load near instantaneously for users.” Basically, AMP pages are stripped back versions of web pages that let users interact and read articles without having to wait. How do they achieve this? A key feature of AMP is the removal of JavaScript, which can slow down the rendering of pages. Instead, lightweight AMP libraries deliver common functionality like carousels and lightboxes.
The layout of traditional email is fairly rigid. AMP for email opens it up with elements like a carousel for media, lightboxes for images and text, and accordions for showing and hiding different sections.
While AMP for email brings revolutionary potential to a powerful medium, not everyone’s convinced it’ll be for the better. In a blog post for Litmus, Jain Mistry outlines a few problems the technology may face: AMP for email only works in Gmail: Currently AMP for email is exclusive to Gmail. If your email list is primarily Gmail users, this may not be an issue. If it isn’t, you may have to create a non-AMP version of your email for non-Gmail users.
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. Live Updates: Instead of the need to search for updated information (e.g. flight delayed, new gate, etc.) in his inbox, the user can simply open one AMP-based email and the updated information is already available.
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.
According to statista.com, Google’s email service Gmail is used by more than 1,5 billion active users worldwide. There have been many Gmail innovations since its introduction in 2004 in order to improve user-experience.
As an innovation leader, you should be amongst the first in your realm to implement Schema.org into your email marketing toolbox, allowing you to be seen as a technology leader in your field. Moreover, it allows you to enhance your email marketing platform with necessary enhancements and changes required to fully being able to deliver the additonal semantic markup code. See extra on email marketing trends on https://emailinnovations.com/events-directory/.
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.
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.
AMP for Email aims to keep you in your email rather than shuffling you off to a browser. For example, when you get an email from Pinterest, instead of sending you to the Pinterest app or some in-app browser when you click a link, an AMP-powered email will let you use Pinterest inside your email. Making emails fully interactive is a BFD. AMP for Email is set to introduce changes to email that will impact anyone who designs, develops, markets, or just generally works with email.