AMP for Email helps companies optimize their emails with interactive elements that deliver a unique and engaging user experience. If you’re interested in using AMP marketing in your email strategy, it’s essential to know the functions, benefits, limitations, and stipulations regarding AMP emails.
AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” initially launched by Google in 2016 as an open-sourced library to help publishers load pages or sites more quickly in mobile. It’s had a huge impact on SEO and now it’s ready for email. AMP for Email is the ability to combine dynamic, real-time, up-to-date content, and interactivity into a personalized individual experience for every Gmail recipient inside their inbox.
What Does AMP for Email Mean for Email Marketers and Developers?
For marketers, it means that users complete actions directly in the email rather than going off to a landing page, such as RSVPing to an event, taking a survey, verifying their email address, browsing an online catalog of your products, and more.
For developers, the logic is implemented in JavaScript. Styling can be customized easily via CSS3, and you can leverage various AMP elements from carousels to up-to-date fresh content. But to add it to existing emails, you just need to add a new MIME part with a content type of text/x-amp-html as a descendant of multipart/alternative. For developers using SparkPost, we’ve rolled out support for AMP, and you can view documentation here.
What Types of Emails Should Use AMP?
In an earlier blog post, we gave a list of suggestions of how AMP for Email could best be used, however, here are some real-life examples and quotes from some of our customers who were part of the Google AMP beta program.
With Booking.com, recipients can filter between domestic and international travel destinations.
With Pinterest, recipients can search for top board suggestions and add new pins to their boards, all within the inbox!
Our other customers are currently experimenting with incorporating AMP into their email campaigns.
“We’re super excited to see how AMP transforms the email space and are looking forward to adding our product to the mix soon”
– Makena, Product Manager, Zillow
What to Look Out for When Using AMP for Email?
Before you get super excited about adding AMP to your emails, you’ll want to stop and think about how exactly you want to thoughtfully add AMP to enhance your readers’ experiences within the inbox. To be honest, recipients shouldn’t abruptly realize that their messages have been embedded with AMP content, but more so just an intuitive improvement within the email that should have been there from the start.
Think of adding in the carousel component for giving customers — the option to preview the interior photos of an Airbnb rental or new home for sale on Zillow, a shipping status update button on a FedEx and UPS email, or the ability to search and browse without being kicked into a web browser.
Second, AMP content is dynamic and shouldn’t take away from the static nature that email users trust and expect when it comes to email. Confirmation numbers, invoices, purchase confirmations, flight information, and calendar events are parts of an email that shouldn’t be dynamically updated and changed over time, for the sake of users to go back and search their emails to recall certain information on transaction emails.
However, adding in the ability to opt-in and subscribe or opt-out on transaction emails dynamically could be a better transactional email use case. AMP should be used to better your customer’s experiences in the inbox.
Benefits of AMP Email
There’s no doubt that AMP emails are convenient for email recipients, enabling them to accomplish tasks like RSVPing for events, confirming appointments, managing email preferences, booking travel, and more without ever leaving their inbox. AMP marketing benefits customers and businesses alike with all of the following advantages:
Rich inbox experience: AMP emails deliver a highly interactive customer experience, utilizing components like carousels, accordions, tabs, and other dynamic layout options to create a rich and engaging inbox experience.
Enhanced security: Because AMP for Email doesn’t allow third-party advertisements, it maintains greater security and privacy for users, protecting their information from breaches.
Up-to-date information: This technology ensures that all emails stay up to date, reducing the need to send newer, more relevant messages and freeing recipients’ inboxes of excess correspondence.
Improved in-mail capabilities: AMP emails enable users to engage with content and take immediate action with fewer clicks necessary to achieve the intended function. This feature boosts the amount of time recipients spend browsing your email, increasing the chances of user responses.
Better customer experience: Due to the simple and convenient nature of AMP emails, users are likely to have an improved user experience, and in turn, a more positive reception for your brand.
Greater engagement: AMP for Email enables you to build exciting visual elements into your emails, such as GIFs, videos, and other creative content, to increase user engagement.
Is AMP Marketing Right for My Business’s Email Strategy?
While AMP for Email offers many benefits for companies and email users, the justification for incorporating this element into a business’s email strategy varies per organization. If you’re unsure whether AMP is right for your business, you should keep various considerations in mind before making your final decision:
Viewability: It’s important to verify that your email subscribers use a supported email client that allows them to open and view AMP emails. If most of your subscribers have this capability, AMP for Email is likely a good fit.
Return on investment (ROI): AMP-enabled emails take double the amount of time to create than standard Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) emails, meaning they have higher development costs. It’s vital to confirm that you can recover these expenses through your campaign ROI.
Value: Consider whether AMP emails will provide additional value to your emails. For example, an email campaign that only features blog posts probably wouldn’t benefit from AMP components, while one that includes an interactive customer survey would.
Expiration: If you send promotional emails that eventually expire, AMP for Email would likely be a logical investment, as it ensures that all content is up to date even after you send it.3456790-
Expertise: When creating AMP emails, you must validate each template to minimize the risk of improper rendering, account for third message types, and work with server-side language to build data-exchange endpoints. These actions require extensive development knowledge and can come with a steep learning curve for those who lack this expertise.
How Do I Get Access From Gmail to Send AMP Emails?
Gmail has implemented a set of guidelines that you have to follow to send AMP emails through any email service provider (ESP). When you’re ready to launch a dynamic email like AMP, you must first register with Google by following a series of steps.
1. Verify That You Meet the Registration Guidelines
Google has a comprehensive set of registration guidelines that you must meet to use AMP for Email. Be sure to confirm that you adhere to all of the following requirements before registering:
Send a real example email, not a demo.
Ensure that all emails have a similar HTML or text Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) part.
Verify that your emails contain no bugs.
Authenticate all emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC).
Conform to the suggested email best practices.
Register each sender email separately.
Don’t allow third parties to create or send emails directly.
Follow all Gmail Bulk Sender Guidelines.
Maintain a low spam complaint rate.
2. Send an Email From Your Production Server
Once you’ve confirmed that you meet Google’s registration guidelines, you will send a real, production-ready email from your production servers and submit the AMP email MIME part to ampforemail.whitelisting@gmail.com. Google uses this email to verify that you comply with all applicable requirements.
When you transmit the email, make sure you send it directly rather than forwarding it, as Google removes AMP MIME parts from forwarded emails. It’s also a good rule of thumb to test your email in Gmail to ensure that the AMP version is correct before submitting it to Google.
3. Fill out a Registration Form
After completing all of the previous steps, you can finalize the process by filling out the four-page sender registration form. Once you submit the questionnaire, your part is over. Google should respond to your request within five business days.
Note that Google will not accept your application if you send a test email, submit an email that doesn’t contain an AMP MIME part, or don’t send an email for review at all.
Where Does AMP for Email Work? What Email Providers Support AMP Emails?
AMP for Email is exclusive to Gmail, meaning these dynamic emails will only work for Gmail users. Though AMP only works through Gmail, recipients don’t necessarily have to have a gmail.com email address to receive these emails.
While Gmail is the only email client that supports AMP for Email, many email providers also reinforce these messages:
SparkPost
Adobe Campaign Classic
Elastic Email
MessageGears
Amazon Pinpoint
eSputnik
MindBox
Amazon Simple Email Service
ExpressPidgeon
MoonMail
AWeber
Klaviyo
Salesforce
Blueshift
MagNews
SendPulse
Braze
Mailrelay
SocketLabs
Cheetah Digital
Mapp Cloud
Clang
Maileon
Tripolis
Copernica
Mailgun
Twilio SendGrid
Customer.io
Mailkit
dotdigital
Mailmodo
Iterable