What Does AMP for Email Mean for Retail Marketers?

In February, Gmail’s Product Manager, Aakash Sahney, revealed in a blog post that the email giant will be bringing the power of “AMP” to email through a developer preview of AMP for Email.

Sounds good—but what does it mean?

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages: an open-source framework designed to make mobile pages load faster and build rich web pages.

Consequently, it’s hoped that AMP for Email will enable developers (and, in-turn, email marketers) to design more engaging and relevant email experiences.

What does AMP for Email actually look like?

The aim of the new feature is to let recipients actually interact with an email once they’ve opened it; i.e. instead of having to click on a link and complete a task elsewhere, they can just complete the task inside the email.

Retail marketing use-cases of AMP for Email could be:

• New subscribers filling out a preference centre (i.e. a form specifying how often they’d like to be contacted, and the sort of content they’d like to hear about) within the email, instead of having to click through to the retailer’s website
• Recipients browsing, adding or buying products within the email itself
• More brands being able to send emails that let recipients RSVP for an event straight from the email (e.g. this could be a product launch your London branch is hosting, or a private sale in Leeds)

AMP for Email also ensures information within an email is always 100% up-to-date.

From only displaying in-stock products in your product recommendations, to a banner only displaying the latest arrivals, it has the potential to ensure email content “never gets stale”.

In other words: help you provide an even better customer experience.

According to the blog post, Pinterest is one site already “developing new experiences” using AMP for Email.

The example below (taken from the original blog post) shows a recipient browsing the site straight from their inbox:

Another company developing new experiences for consumers using AMP for Email is Internet calendar tool Doodle. Here’s the example Sahney uses in his post:

Will it work?

As staunch advocates of interactive, personalised and dynamic email marketing (who believe a step away from one-size-fits-all marketing can only be a good thing), we recognise AMP for Email has amazing potential. (Read our CEO’s blog post on why the age of ESP is dead here.)

However, the jury is out on whether or not it will actually gain traction. For example, over the next couple of months, it will be interesting to see if email clients such as Outlook and Yahoo decide to support it. 

From our perspective, we’re neutral.

If it becomes popular? Awesome.

But there are other ways of making your emails more personalised right now, without having to wait to see whether AMP for Email takes off.

For example:

Personalised product recommendations: Using customer data, display the right products, at the right price and size, to each and every recipient on your list.

You can learn more about product recommendations about the different types of engines available here.

Other forms of dynamic content: From banners showing the local weather forecast in each recipient’s location to personalised incentives based on lifetime value, dynamic content let’s you power relevant, up-to-date messages from one single template.

‘Tactical emails‘: Sending one-off emails to people you know will be interested in the content (e.g. category- or product-specific emails to people who have demonstrated an interest in that category or product).