AMP emails are for real now. In Google’s AMP event in Amsterdam, Google announced the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for emails. This new development received a major applause from the email community.

AMP emails means reduced email loading time and more engagement. AMP or the AMP project started in 2015 backed by Google to speed up the page loading time on mobiles, especially on processor-restricted devices.

The AMP pages negated the need for Javascript which gave this project the popularity that it enjoys currently. Marketers couldn’t have asked for more until emails[AMP] came into light. Delivering carousals and light-boxes like functionality became smooth with lightweight AMP libraries. Add to this, Google’s promise of better mobile search placement was the icing on the cake. There was no reason why publishers wouldn’t adopt AMP.

According to Study: ‘Email was publicly released for Gmail Web in 2019, allowing users to include AMP elements within emails.’

Now that AMP is available for emails, what does this mean?

AMP email or AMP HTML email is a subset of the same AMP project. It offers the same JavaScript-like functionality for emails. The reason why they made email marketers so happy is that:

Most email clients tend to block javascript by default. The AMP offers a secure but limited alternative to javascript without allowing senders to run arbitrary codes in emails.

The proposed AMP for email will require to add a new MIME part “text-x-amphtml” to the email that contains AMP HTML markup. This will help email clients to render this part instead of the HTML part. Email clients that do not support AMP emails will continue to render it as a normal HTML part.

As of now, not all email clients will support AMP emails. Inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and Mail.ru will support this emails. Email delivery servers that will support AMP email delivery include Amazon SES and Pinpoint, Sendgrid, Litmus, and Sparkpost.

As of now, AMP email is only accessible through Gmail Developer Preview. Google hopes to make it available for all users by this year, both on webmail and mobile app. Since it is available only to developers, they need to sign an NDA to access it.

What does this mean for EasySendy users?

Following suite with Google’s new announcement, EasySendy team has also started developing AMP emails within EasySendy. The AMP email widget will be made available within the email builder and will follow the same drag and drop pattern.

What can you do with AMP emails on EasySendy?

The AMP email widget will have options to add –

• Menu builder
• Survey forms
• Poll options
• Ratings and feedback
• Calendar scheduling
• Social sharing

The major benefit of an AMP email is that your subscribers will not have to leave your email browser to do any of the engagements. Whether you want to collect feedback or get your subscribers to participate in a poll, everything can be done from within the email.

Add to this, you can integrate Google Analytics to track end-user behavior. Get subscriptions and unsubscribes done in just one click right inside your AMP email.

Using AMP emails will drastically reduce the need for a separate landing page because the emails will be interactive and engaging by default.

It is amazing how this emails[AMP] has set abuzz the entire email community. However, this isn’t the first time Google has approached to make emails interactive. It had earlier tested the interactive Carousels in 2010. It also kept on adding interactive features on emails using Schema.org. Now, with AMP emails, Google seems to have hit the right chord.

Surprisingly, Google isn’t alone who was testing interactive emails. Microsoft had also experimented a sandboxed JavaScript approach in 2010 – the Hotmail Active Views. Sadly the adoption rates were pretty low and it faded, all thanks to the complicated implementation process.

In its second attempt, Microsoft has now launched a more limited version of its interactive email – Actionable Messages. For instance, in the below image, the recipient can approve or reject a message within Outlook:

Source

So far so good. But with all the excitement comes the weighing of pro’s and con’s of AMP emails.

The Good part –

• Email recipients can take actions without leaving the email.
• Built-in modules like Caraousels and light-boxes.
• Implementation requires only a few lines of markup

The Bad part –

• Adding of a new MIME part.
• Understanding new Javascript-like language (but not) – Javascript syntax.

Another issue with this kind of emails is that it does not support the !important selector, the img tag, inline styles and background attributes. It is perplexing at this moment given that these are the basics of HTML email development.

How these challenges will be met or how Google will address them is yet to be seen. Till then, it is worth all the wait because interactive emails is the future we’re heading into. Better now than never.

Frequently Asked Questions