How AMP Emails are setting new records for email conversions (+cases and examples)

AMP for email introduced by Google has become an immensely popular topic in recent months. So what’s all the hype about? Can it increase your email conversions? How’s it different from static emails?

I’m sure you have a lot of questions about AMP emails. Let’s demystify AMP emails and what they mean for email marketing in the long run.

What’s AMP for Email? 

AMP is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a set of open standards launched by Google in 2015 to create web pages that are smooth and provide better user experiences. In 2019, Google launched AMP for email for Gmail web allowing users to include AMP components inside emails.

AMP emails are often referred to as “dynamic emails” and “interactive emails”. Dynamic email brings web functionalities into email design like smart forms, carousels, accordions, hamburger menus, etc.

For instance, users can fill out forms, respond to surveys, and reply to comments inside the email in real-time. So without redirecting to a website or landingpage.  

So, what’s the hype about AMP Emails? 

We have seen social media, web, and app technologies evolving over the past few decades, whereas emails have essentially remained the same. This while emails account for the largest tonnage of marketing traffic on the internet. According to statistics the number of email users is set to increase to around 4.48 billion users in 2024.

So naturally, marketers have been looking for ways to innovate with their emails. Innovation in email is important, because email is closely tied to conversions. Marketers over the world got  excited when Google introduced AMP for Email. Although there are some drawbacks, it didn’t take much time for the email community to see AMP could be a breakthrough for the email ecosystem – one we’ve all been waiting for. 

How is AMP different from static emails? 

The traditional email is mostly HTML-based. A marketer is limited to playing with HTML and CSS for design. It can only include links and images to improve engagement. There has been a murmur of interactive emails. But these interactive emails haven’t become too popular. There was a technical limitation to create true interactivity in the inbox.

This changed with the arrival of AMP emails. Now, interactivity similar to apps can be achieved within emails. Let’s see how AMP emails differ from standard HTML emails. 

What can you do with AMP Emails? 

What type of conversion and improvements can you expect from AMP email? There are a lot of AMP for email ideas and use cases. Let’s go through the main benefits one by one and how they work.

Generate leads

You can use AMP emails to nurture prospects throughout the sales funnel and fast-track conversions. A few of the popular use cases are as follows:

• Engage your prospects effectively within emails to fast track conversions 
• Nurture cold leads through interactive emails
• Send lively emails to onboard customers and make a great first impression
• Add calendars to emails while sending out invites and for appointments scheduling
• Increase response rates by sending dynamic emails, even for  (cold) outreach emails 

Conduct surveys

You can also collect customer or prospect data via AMP forms. There are a lot of use-cases here are a few examples:

• Run NPS surveys, simplify job satisfaction interviews and HR surveys for better growth decisions 
• Perform concept testing and get a high number of product reviews to improve your product and services. 
• Use multi-step forms to perform in-depth market research.
• Get more audience response by sending out opinion polls. 

Boost sales

AMP emails are suited for the entire sales pipeline, no matter the product. In fact, B2B, Brick and Mortar and eCommerce email marketing has a lot to gain from AMP emails. Some examples of sales application:

• Creating in inbox shopping carts, bringing the checkout into the emails for frictionless payment experience 
• Sending engaging interactive emails to improve the cart abandonment rate
• Style your offers and promotions with interactive elements  like carts, calendars, calculators to get more sales
• Sending transactional and auto-triggered interactive emails to improve user experience.

Improve engagement

AMP emails help to glam up your email campaigns and increase engagement metrics. Think about the following use cases:

• Offer a smoother reading experience to your recipients with dynamically updating content
• Adding extra glam to your seasonal offers and campaigns by including carts, interactive forms and product catalogs.
• Calculating Offer, think for instance about SIP(Systematic Investment Plan), premiums, EMI, mutual funds and more within emails
• Amplifying the impact of press releases and announcements by including interactive feedback elements like (live) ratings or data and combining it with the next steps in the user journey for sign-up or sales.

What are the pros and cons of AMP emails? 

AMP email is a package. It has some unprecedented features in emails that make it highly desirable. But it also has some drawbacks. Here are the main pros and cons of AMP for email to help see if interactive AMP email is something for you.

Pros of AMP for Email

• AMP emails let marketers create engaging email experiences by using standard code. This contrasts with HTML and CSS-based interactive emails where there is no official backing of email providers, and features of these email clients are subject to change without notice. 
• AMP for emails supports live content, this allows marketers to update email content post-send so that it’s the most relevant at the time of open. This alone is a viable reason to adopt AMP for Email right away.
• AMP for Email will change recipients’ behavior and metrics over time. For instance, as users start taking action inside emails, engagement metrics will rise. While that is great, landing page engagement might fall.

Cons of AMP for Email

• Email marketers should understand the mark-up language and coding specification of AMP emails. Interactive emails require marketers to learn additional coding if they would do them custom. This is a smaller point against using AMP, as it is a downside of doing any interactivity.
• AMP requires marketers to write a third MIME type part for an email in addition to HTML and plain text. It also involves email service providers to support AMP and be able to send it.
• Every sender should maintain a good email reputation to send AMP emails. This begins with the process of whitelisting your domain before you can start sending out AMP emails. The whitelisting process covers security certifications like DMARC, DKIM and SPF and also verification with the respective email clients (Gmail, Mail.ru and Yahoo Mail).

Do AMP emails convert better than HTML emails? 

Of course you want to know if AMP email converts better than other (regular) email. Well we did the research at Mailmodo, to back up and prove the positive impact and understand the impact of AMP on conversion rates. 

The only way of testing is to send out both AMP and HTML email campaigns in various  industries with similar audience samples and sizes. 

It has the potential to alter the email marketing landscape, as they can manage call-to-actions inside the emails.  This is one of the ‘aha!’ moments in Marketing.

225% more conversion through interactive survey email campaigns

In our first case study, a payment gateway provider was looking for a way to improve response rates for the customer feedback that they collected via emails.

The response rate was very poor for these surveys. This meant that our client wasn’t able to get qualitative feedback on product features and user experience. This is when they turned to AMP emails to improve the response numbers.

We used AMP email to set up the entire survey flow inside the mail body. This led to a 225% increase in survey response rate using interactive emails compared to the standard HTML email campaigns. The users were greeted with a dynamic questionnaire, leading to quick feedback and higher conversions. 

41% job application conversion with interactive emails

For a candidate matching service, AM increased its job application rate through an interactive campaign with a quiz. They were facing low submission rates. With a straight test on two campaigns with a similar sample of audiences, we compared the performance of both interactive and normal HTML emails (CTA and landing page).

The interactive email campaign saw a submission rate of41%, whereas the HTML email campaigns received about an 11% conversion rate. A remarkable increase in email conversions! 

8x higher conversions for interactive NPS survey

For a luxury brand, we sent interactive email and HTML to audiences for a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. We saw an incredible increase in conversions with interactive emails (3.7%). It received 8X higher conversions when compared to standard HTML campaigns (0.4%). 

These case studies clearly proved that interactive emails have the potential to disrupt the whole of the email marketing space and set a new standard for conversion and engagement metrics. 

How to get started with interactive AMP emails? 

Getting started with interactive AMP emails might look a bit difficult. A typical roadmap for this looks like below

1. Get your domain whitelisted with your email client (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Mail.ru), which involves 
   1. multiple steps of getting certifications like SPF, DKIM, DMARC.
   2. sending verification requests to your email client
2. Create your AMP email content. Mostly this will require some development efforts and coding on your part. 
3. Debug and test your AMP email. You can use the AMP playground for this. 
4. Start sending your emails.

Well, another way is to start using an ESP (like Mailmodo) that has AMP features built-in. Check out this full Mailmodo review to see how it performs. Marketers should be able to focus on marketing and not the logistics of getting ready to send or create AMP emails. The process then looks like as below:

1. Get your domain whitelisted without filling in too many forms. 
2. Choose from a variety of interactive AMP templates and modify them easily with a drag and drop editor and previewer. No coding required. 
3. Start sending interactive emails. 

Apart from these, your ESP should have features like contact management and segmentation, auto-trigger scheduling, transactional emailing, email journey builder, and a detailed dashboard to help you figure out ways to improve conversions.

The future of email

Emails have always been the marketer’s go-to channel to communicate with customers. With AMP emails, it is now up to marketers to upgrade their old-school marketing campaigns and provide an interactive email experience to customers.