AMP for Email
Email has been around for 50 years. I have been using email for 30+ years. And yet, the first time I actually did something within an email was only a few weeks ago. I received an email with a quiz with multiple options. Ordinarily, one would have to click through to a web page, respond and see the right answer. In this particular instance, I answered in the email and saw the response (right/wrong) right within the email. All in my Gmail inbox. Without clicking and going out of it.
This ‘magic’ is called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It was introduced by Google a few years ago to bring interactivity to emails. Until recently, all I had seen were the demo videos on sites. While Gmail supports it (along with Yahoo Mail), AMP is not yet supported by most other email service providers and mail clients. As a result, its adoption has been very slow. I had first seen AMP as a hot new email technology at a conference in April 2019. Little has changed in the two years since.
AMP gives email marketers the opportunity to transform the user experience. Emails can do so much more – forms, image galleries, product cards, games, dynamic data, and of course, quizzes. One has to really experience it to feel the possibilities and imagine a new future for emails.
As I started thinking about AMP, my focus was on microns. Microns, as I have explained earlier, are short, informational, identified emails – made to fit in a single mobile screen and consumable in a few seconds. Think of them as a new email format – deliberately constrained to drive an increase in open rates from micro-attention consumers.
What if we added AMP to microns and made every short email dynamic and interactive? What if we created AMPlets which could be easily embedded inside every micron to make it interesting and exciting for the recipient? Creating AMP-enabled emails is still a time-consuming process even though there are many sites now that make it easier. What if creating an AMPlet could be as simple as creating regular text and image microns? This could make each micron even more of a delight and take us closer to the goal of driving email open rates from an average of 15% to closer to 100%. For the mission of “No Email Unopened”, AMP-enabled microns can be a huge enabler.
