Innovations
There are many innovations which are coming together to bring DEF to life. Individually, the enabling tech has existed for some time, but no one has yet imagined this new future and put it all together.
AMP in Email: AMP makes emails interactive. It has been around for a few years. A recent essay by Dmitry Kudrenko discussed its pros and cons: Among the pros mentioned:
- Increased conversion
The primary goal of most marketing emails is to prompt recipients to take a specific action. This could include making a purchase, visiting the company’s blog for more information, filling out forms, etc. With AMP, subscribers can perform all these actions directly within the email, even engaging in games.
- AMP opens new horizons
Thanks to AMP, newsletters have transformed, becoming more dynamic and interactive. Marketers can now gamify their email campaigns, allow users to complete event bookings (from selecting time slots to receiving confirmation notifications), load additional product items, and even collect feedback directly within the emails. In short, features that were once exclusive to web pages can now be integrated into emails. This enhanced functionality gives businesses a competitive edge by making emails significantly more effective.
- Real-time content
AMP enables real-time content in emails. This means the content updates in our inboxes each time we open the email, ensuring that brands share only the most current information with their subscribers.
[See AMP’s Magic: Coming Soon to Your Email Inbox.]
Magic Carts: This is an innovation being pioneered by Netcore as part of its Inbox Commerce platform. Magic carts can be used for items abandoned by shoppers and for sending new merchandising triggers. [See Email Shops can Transform eCommerce.]
Atomic Rewards: These are micro-incentives for the upstream and downstream actions in a conversion funnel. Brands can reward attention, data, ratings, reviews, referrals, and much more. This pan-brand currency can gamify in-mail actions and enable marketers to shift consumer behaviour. [See Atomic Rewards: The Solution to Attention Recession and Loyalty 2.0: How Brands can Tokenise Customer Attention and Data.]
Action Ads: Ads are the economic engine of consumer Internet. About $400 billion is spent by brands on new customer acquisition and retargeting of existing customers. Half of this money is wasted because of wrong acquisition and reacquisition (instead of reactivation). Ads in email footers open up a trillion monthly touchpoints for brands to engage better with customers. Because these ads can come to life with user interaction, much more can be done in-place without the need for a clickthrough to a landing page. Also, for the first time, ads can be served to individuals where the PII (email ID) is known thus leading to interactions valuable for both advertisers and consumers.
Pay for RoI: DEF’s next innovation is to price everything for performance rather than opens, impressions or interactions. This is possible because actions can be completed within the email itself. This can lead to open-ended budgets because brands can pay for clearly defined outcomes.
Number@MyMobile: This is an idea which can expand the scope of DEF by powering emails redirected by consumers to an intermediate email ID linked with their mobile number. Together with the B2B push from brands, DEF can become a reality sooner than later. [See Number@MyMobile: An Email 2.0 Mailbox for every Mobile.]
