AMP for Email use in the travel business
Travel industry developments : newsletters with AMP for E-mail. 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.
Interest in interactive email is high. At the beginning of 2018, marketers told Litmus that interactive email is the top email design trend of 2018, with more marketers expected to embrace interactive email techniques. AMP for Email, in theory, has the potential to bring email marketers a big step closer to their interactive email goals.
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? In the travel industry, especially for travel agencies and online travel booking portals, email marketing is the most important direct communication channel for getting in touch with their customers. There already plenty of good reasons to use email as your number one channel. But email is lacking dynamic elements. The recipient has to be referred to a website in order to perform further action. However, this technological gap is going to be closed rather soon with Google’s AMP for Email. 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. Read more info at Travel industry news : newsletters with AMP for E-mail.
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.
Now that you know what AMP is, you can probably imagine how AMP for Email might work. Essentially, it brings the power of AMP into email and, like AMP, offers JavaScript-like functionality for creating dynamic emails without actually using JavaScript. This is particularly useful since all email clients block Javascript by default – AMP offers a limited alternative to JavaScript without having to use arbitrary code in email. The AMP for Email spec is proposing to do all this by allowing email publishers to embed AMP directly in a message body as a new MIME part – text-x-amphtml – which would be rendered by email clients (with a fallback to non-AMP content). The proposed name for this particular project is “AMPHTML Email.”