AMP: Accelerating Goal Conversions With Just One Email 

Email has emerged as a growing channel for marketers to cultivate relationships with customers, build credibility and trust, and impact revenue. In fact, according to our 2021 State of Email report, over 90 percent of marketers say email is critical to the overall success of their company, and over 40 percent of companies intend to increase their investment in email marketing in 2022. But as we look to the future of email marketing, how do marketers ensure their investments will pay off?

Increased privacy measures, such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection, are forcing significant changes in the email space, but one fact remains: fully personalized and automated experiences are critical to future success — especially within the retail and e-commerce industries. Consider the following:

• Eighty percent of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that personalizes experiences (Epsilon).
• Organizations using advanced personalization generate 17 percent more revenue through their campaigns (Liveclicker/Relevancy Group).
• Seventy-one percent of consumers feel frustrated with impersonal experiences (SmarterHQ).

One effective — yet largely underutilized — email tactic that promotes real-time, personalized brand experiences: accelerated mobile pages (AMP).

What is AMP?

Developed by Google in 2015, this open-source technology was designed to boost page load times on smartphones and tablets. A few years later, AMP was introduced into email in order to create interactive experiences for recipients. Now, retail marketers can capitalize on this by turning static, one-way emails into engaging conversations.

With AMP in email, servers receive fresh content from remote endpoints, which enables marketers to update emails in real time. It supports a range of interactive features within advertising email campaigns and uses a markup that works with both HTML and CSS. Finally, marketers can increase sales through abandoned cart campaigns, shopping carts, and payment options as well as send surveys and collect data all without their recipients leaving their email.

How Can Marketers Use AMP?

So how is AMP currently being used? Have you ever received an email with a Google Doc form embedded in the email so you could comment directly in the chain? That’s an example of AMP in action. Retailers, and e-commerce companies specifically, have the opportunity to significantly expand their use of AMP.

Take a clothing retailer, for example, promoting its new line of shirts. AMP enables brands to update pricing and availability in real time within the email and change content based on customer preferences. It also allows marketers to collect data on email subscribers and filter through preferences, such as size, colors, specific styles, and more.

Furthermore, as social media continues its meteoric rise and as influencers become more “influential,” social feeds and posts can be embedded in emails. Brands can also create their own interactive community with polls, quizzes, and like buttons that update automatically. These examples, though, are just the tip of the iceberg. AMP has a variety of other features — and a growing list of use cases for retailers — including:

• carousels and sliders;
• animation;
• data binding features to dynamically and automatically update data or content;
• support for attribute selectors and pseudo-class support; and
• location-based content.

AMP will continue to evolve and enhance interactive touchpoints with prospects and customers, creating automation-based and highly personalized email campaigns — two of email marketing’s most critical components in 2022. As retail marketers implement AMP more frequently, it will shorten marketing and email funnels, resulting in faster conversions. Ultimately, AMP will push email to even greater heights and give customers what they truly want: real-time, buyer-led brand interactions.

Cynthia Price is the senior vice president of marketing at Litmus, an all-in-one email marketing platform that provides the tools and solutions your team needs to create effective email campaigns that convert.