Background: What is AMP and AMP emails?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for short) is an open-sourced technology made by Google and other tech companies, used to create fast-loading mobile pages.
It’s sort of like a toolkit for web developers to build mobile-friendly pages, but is now rarely used in web development today.
This is because there are easier ways to create web pages that load on both desktop and mobile, without the need of extra overhead (like AMP).
However, AMP still finds use today through AMP emails; with the power of AMP, email marketers can create dynamic emails, which offer a seamless user experience and averages a higher conversion rate compared to normal, static emails.
Despite these benefits, AMP emails require more time spent on development and quality assurance testing, because they’re not supported on a majority of inboxes.
The following post will dive deeper to explore 3 key benefits and trade-offs of AMP emails.
Pros of AMP Emails
AMP emails are dynamic
This is the main benefit of using AMP to build emails.
More specifically, AMP lets you build dynamic content within emails. This means you could do things within an email — without having to open to a new web page — such as:
- games
- appointment scheduling
- forms and surveys
- image carousels
- and most importantly, checkout completions
AMP emails have a high conversion rate
AMP emails reduce a lot of friction because you don’t need to open a new page — everything can be done within the email.
This offers a much faster and smoother user experience, making it easier for your customers to complete checkout, fill a survey, or book an appointment.
For example, a typical abandoned cart email reminds customers of the items left in their shopping cart.
Whereas with AMP, you can not only remind customers of their cart items, but they can also complete their checkout and payment without ever exiting their email or opening their web browser!
AMP emails are unique
Most of the emails you receive everyday are considered static emails; they are usually either templated or are written only with text.
While these emails serve their purpose well, it’s hard to make these emails stand out from the crowd.
In contrast, dynamic emails made with AMP provide a unique experience for your subscribers. Displaying images in the form of a carousel or embedding a video game into your emails offer an experience that a vast majority of newsletters do not have.
Cons of AMP Emails
AMP emails must be coded
Unfortunately, not all ESPs support the creation of AMP emails.
However the ones that do will likely require you to code the email from scratch, rather than using a drag-and-drop editor.
This isn’t too big of a deal since the best email marketers know how to write HTML anyway, but it’s still very time consuming to code an entire email.
It’s therefore less appealing to create an AMP email unless it’ll be reused often, like appointment reminder emails or periodic surveys.
AMP emails are not rendered on all inboxes
The future of AMP is uncertain.
It was originally intended for mobile web development, but is now mostly used dynamic email development.
In addition, there are only two major public inbox services that support AMP: Gmail and Yahoo, whereas Outlook recently dropped support for AMP emails.
This means that when you build an AMP email, only subscribers that use Gmail or Yahoo will be able to enjoy its dynamic features.
AMP emails need a backup email
So what about inboxes that don’t use AMP? What happens when they receive an AMP email?
Because AMP is not supported by all inboxes, email marketers are therefore required to build a backup HTML email — this is the email that non-AMP users will receive.
Meaning everytime you wish to build an AMP email, you’ll also have to build an HTML email. AMP emails therefore require twice as much effort to build, QA, and send, compared to regular emails.
Conclusion
AMP emails can be a powerful asset for your email marketing strategy due to its dynamic functions, but are often difficult and time consuming to build.
That’s why marketing agencies like to to extend their product line with AMP emails through our white label email marketing services. This way, we can take care of the technical work behind AMP, so that they can focus on delivering value to clients.