On the 26th March, Google officially launched AMP for Email, their way to breathe new life into the outdated, static HTML email format. This service requires a Gmail account for senders, but will be accessible for anyone on Outlook, Yahoo Mail and Russian site mail.ru that happens to be a recipient. This list will also be widening as time goes on, as Google have explicitly said that any site that wants to support this feature can join in.

The basic foundation of AMP for Email is that it’ll turn the old style of emails into a dynamic and fresh way to be a lot more effective, as consumer behaviour has changed massively over the years while email has stood still. “Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously—evolving from static flat content to interactive apps—yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task,” Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. “If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website.”

Because of this inconvenience, a more interactive form of email has always been sought after. At the beginning of 2018, email marketing brand Litmus named “more personalised and dynamic content” and “interactive email experiences” as their top two email design trends for 2019. In this, they detailed the Co-Founder of Really Good Emails, Matthew Smith, explaining: “I want to see real-time ecommerce in email, but I don’t think the tech is ready for it yet. Once we have 1-click purchasing in email, where email can retain my logged in state for a shop, then we will see a shift in money, talent, and tech into email. I doubt this will take off in 2019, but we’ll see.”

With this new revelation, there seems to have been a shift where this now seems more likely than ever, and not too far into the future. In theory, it has the potential to pull marketers a lot closer to their email ambitions.

In this article, we’re going to explain roughly what AMP for Email does, and run through some potential pros and cons that people may be mulling over.

 

What is AMP for Email?

AMP for Email’s main aim is to keep you on your email app, instead of having to open a browser to do anything. For example, one of the original participants of this feature, Pintrest, will no longer require you to open a new tab or their app to pin something. You can open an email from them and pin newly recommended things while still on the same page.

This gained popularity due to Google giving mobile search engine priority to websites that used this, as it became synonymous with being faster, easier to run and generally more friendly for those not on a computer.

In the back end, AMP pages in general are more basic versions of web pages that reduce loading times for visitors, especially on mobile. This is possible by excluding JavaScript, which has issues with slowing down rendering pages.

Email sites already block JavaScript, so the main use for AMP for Email is that it utilises the personalisation of AMP, instead of the limited HTML format we’re used to. Having an AMP library means that the person creating an email doesn’t have to make new code from scratch to have carousels or other features in their emails.

 

Pros

 

Easier for recipients

As it’s more convenient for people to use your service, you can expect to get a lot more positive interactions through email. If you’re an e-commerce store, you can expect to get a lot more sales through email, because having fewer clicks in the conversion path results in more people doing it.

 

Customisable and interactive

There are a lot more options to keep customers interested. People creating these emails can add in a multitude of things that weren’t previously available, like the ability to submit things like product reviews directly from their email, for example. Animated images are another thing that helps to make emails less boring.

 

Information is always up-to-date

Information can be updated in real-time, so people see the right information no matter how late they open the email. To companies that need to send emails about bookings, you can consistently update details without needing to send new ones.

 

Protected by Google

A fear people originally had was safety. Scammers could send out a legitimate email and edit it at a later date, swapping the original link to a phishing one under the average user’s nose. Google are fortunately on top of this, as the only people who can create these emails have to be approved by the company individually.

 

Email providers are on board

For recipients to even see or use AMP emails, the email services they use will need to support AMP for Email too. As we’ve explained before, Yahoo Mail, mail.ru and Outlook are already open to the feature, and more will likely follow suit. This means that it isn’t as restricted as first feared, because there are some major players in the picture.

 

Cons

 

May overcomplicate emails

A change could come in the way of the connection between email and site. By taking away the opportunity to visit an actual site, click-rates will drop, and SEO may suffer due to falling site popularity numbers.

 

It’s seen as a Google power-play

We’ve mentioned before that any company wishing to create these emails must be on Gmail and approved by Google themselves. Whitelisting does stop any malicious activity from senders, but it also gives Google a lot of power. It extends their reach and perpetuates the “Google says jump, you say “how high?’” status quo the internet is currently stuck in.

 

More complicated to make

For AMP-powered emails, you’ll need to use a third MIME-type to your email, on top of HTML and CSS. This means an ESP is required to add support for this other MIME-type, or else there is no possibility of making and sending AMP emails. The majority of ESPs aren’t willing to do this.

 

Renders email performance tracking obsolete

it’s not yet clear how well you can track these emails. Currently, there aren’t any ways that you can track how your emails are doing when they have it open. If all the actions are in their inbox, it eliminates a lot of the ways marketers judge success.

 

Conclusion

Overall, AMP for Emails is still in its infancy, so we don’t truly know whether people will latch onto it in the way experts describe. That being said, if you’re a marketer wanting to get their hands on this, it does look to have a lot of benefits and trade-offs that will divide opinions- do the research, wait for others to test the waters, and try it out later if you want the least risk.