Five years since its announcement and four years post-launch, we review AMP for Email technology to evaluate its advantages and disadvantages.

What is AMP for Email?

AMP for Email is a technology from Google that enables dynamic content in emails. In essence, it makes emails functionally similar to web pages. Actions such as filling out forms, booking meetings/appointments, leaving comments, and playing games can now be executed directly within inboxes.

Pros & cons of AMP for Email

Released in 2019, AMP for Email offers plenty of use cases and studies for analysis. Businesses and regular recipients perceive the benefits of AMP emails differently, so let's explore them from various perspectives.

From a business perspective

Pros

1. 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. Studies have shown that incorporating AMP content in emails can increase user response rates by up to 520% and boost ROI from abandoned cart emails by 82%.

2. 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.

3. 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.

Cons

1. Limited support across email clients

Of the four major email clients—Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, and Outlook—only the first two support AMP. This means recipients using Apple Mail and Outlook will not experience the benefits of AMP and will instead see the fallback HTML version of the email.

2. A fallback version of the email is required

What is a fallback, and why is it required? Technically, both AMP and traditional HTML versions form two parts of a single email. If a recipient's email client supports AMP, they'll view the AMP-enhanced email. However, if their email client lacks AMP support, they'll receive the standard HTML version.

Fortunately, tools like Stripo (full disclosure: the author is founder and CEO of Stripo) now exist that enable the generation of AMP content and interactive fallback (based on HTML5 and CSS3) without requiring coding skills. As a result, users of Gmail, Yahoo, and FairEmail will see the AMP version of the email, while Apple Mail users will be presented with the interactive fallback. And Outlook users will see a text fallback. This means that the vast majority of recipients can now perform necessary actions or play games directly within the email.

From the recipients’ perspective

Pros

1. AMP saves time

AMP allows more actions to be performed directly within the email, saving time by reducing the need to visit external websites.

2. More relevant emails

AMP facilitates dynamic content within emails. Consequently, we always encounter fresh content: up-to-date articles in digests, regardless of when we open them, and accurate stock levels for product items (which is important as brands may run out of sale items), among other things.

3. Emails are interactive and fun

Most people enjoy games. The opportunity to have some fun while checking emails in the inbox can make interactions with brands much more enjoyable.

Cons

None. However, when AMP was just released, it was a chance to meet some popular myths back then.

A Myth about AMP: AMP Harms Data Privacy

The content of AMP emails is seriously monitored by Google — they catch and block every email message they find suspicious. However, much work is done to prevent harmful or suspicious content from reaching users’ inboxes.

Email clients

Only whitelisted companies are allowed to send AMP-powered emails. Both Gmail and Yahoo thoroughly check each brand before adding them to their whitelists: Sender domain, DKIM, etc. — everything matters. Whenever Gmail and Verizon decide whether to show the AMP version of the email to the recipients, they check the CORS headers. If the CORS requirements are not satisfied, they show the email fallback. AMP content can’t be forwarded.

Senders (ESPs)

They validate the code of AMP emails. They use rate limiting. And if there are many requests sent from one IP address, then the system checks the content of such emails manually. 

To sum up

As you can see, AMP is an extremely promising technology, and both businesses and recipients can greatly benefit from it.

Photo by Nicole Avagliano on Unsplash