Email Marketing trends : AMP for Email applications in the travel industry

AMP for Email use in travel business. 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.

Doodle is a tool that makes scheduling meetings easier. With the help of polls on locations and times, managers can figure out optimal gathering times for all participants. Normally, these polls require visitors to complete more dynamic actions on a web page. But, with AMP for email, things look a little different. Below, you’ll see an image of a poll that’s being set up in Doodle.

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: For example: Dynamic content, while giving marketers the opportunity to keep their emails up-to-date after sending, could confuse users expecting static content. Mistry writes: “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.”

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. New booking experience: With AMP for Email, your subscribers can book right within the email without ever leaving it.

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.

In order to see your Schema.org implementation in effect on Gmail, you must go through a registration and verification process with Google before you can use email markup in Gmail. You must meet Google’s email sender quality guidelines. Apart from DKIM or SPF verification (which should be no problem for you as a legite sender for your email domain), you must also make sure to send out at least a hundred emails per day to Gmail users from your sending platform constantly for a few weeks before applying. This way, Google makes sure to see that you are trustworthy, requiring you to not have any or only a very low rate of spam complaints from Gmail recipients. Read more on email marketing trends on https://emailinnovations.com/the-email-is-being-amp-ed/.

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.

However, it’s not clear how marketers will be able to track and report on AMP-powered emails. In interactive emails, much more of the engagement is happening within the inbox—whether it’s hovering over items in a carousel or clicking through a selection of deals—and none of these actions can be measured with traditional email marketing metrics. If marketers are keen to implement AMP-powered emails, it’s clear that they would need to rethink how email performance is captured and measured.

But not everyone is convinced we need this. TechCrunch says it’s a terrible idea “borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage rather than user needs.” Ouch. To help you make your own mind up, this article will cover some of the key information you need to know about working with the new AMP for Email spec, its potential for modernizing email, and possible use cases for designers, marketers and content creators.