AMP for Email use in travel industry. What is AMP for Email ? AMP for Email delivers a personalized experience to every Gmail recipient. AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” initially launched by Google in 2016 as an open-sourced library to help publishers load pages/sites more quickly in mobile. It’s had a huge impact on SEO and now it’s ready for email.
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.
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? 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: Real-time: Show only selected products based on their real-time availability and up-to-date pricing. Even if the email recipient opens the email a day or two later, it will then show those products available and at the price at that specific moment in time. Basically: With every email open, quite possibly, the information rendered in that email can change.
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.
A quite similar process is necessary if you want to see the Microsoft Outlook way of Schema.org implemention in action. You must go through through Microsoft’s registration and verification process before you can use the actionable messages in Outlook: Microsoft’s email sender guidelines. Schema.org is primarily used in Gmail and Outlook, summing up to a substantial email client market share in the business world. However, it can be speculated, though, that these enhancements will drive innovation even further, also affecting other email service global players and their email clients such as Apple Mail. See more on email marketing trends at https://emailinnovations.com/events-directory/.
Email marketers already use two different MIME types to create emails for the HTML part (text/html) and plain-text part (text/plain) of an email. This is why, in your ESP, you have to create an HTML version and a plain-text version of every email you send. For AMP-powered emails, you’ll have to add a third MIME-type to your email. And that’s the problem: Without ESPs adding support for this third MIME-type, there is physically no way of creating and sending AMP-powered emails.
Marketers often wish they could update the content of an email after it’s been sent to correct a mistake or refresh an offer. With AMP-powered emails, marketers will be able to do just that. But, the question is, should they be able to? Updating an email post-send could be troubling or confusing from a subscriber perspective. A medium known to consumers as a static one turns into a dynamic feed that the sender can change as they please. 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.
Email is about to become more useful and interactive – or even more annoying and distracting, depending on how you look at it – thanks to Google’s new AMP for Email project. Essentially, the search giant is seeking to save people who get lost in the rabbit hole that is their smartphone. You know when you’re reading something on your phone and after clicking around for a few minutes you think to yourself, “what app am I in again?” And then it turns out you’re not actually reading that article in Safari – you’re in Facebook.