Will Email Become Interactive Soon?

Gmail recently announced the introduction of its AMP (“Accelerated Mobile Pages”) within email. This will not only enable content to load faster, but also add dynamic elements within email, so that e.g. for travel booking, mail receivers do not open a separate website anymore but can do the actions directly within the email.

But what does that mean for Marketers? Do all Marketers need to develop AMP content now? Not yet. AMP is in “developer mode” for testing now, the official release should be by end of the year.

It will be interesting to see, whether other providers plan to support AMP as well to make it a general success.

Critical voices from the industry Today, there’s some critical voices towards AMP from the industry (e.g. Devin Coldewey on TechCrunch). Email itself has always be simple and static – when you receive a mail today and open it in 10 years, it should still look the same (at least the content and text can’t change. For hosted images the story might be different). AMP breaks with that now – whenever you open an email, the content might be different. Question is, if that’s a desired enhancement for the medium from the users’ point of view.

Marketers might benefit Of course, there’s also positive impact of dynamic content. Let’s think about newsletters. Marketers sending daily offers for instance can now display tomorrow’s offer on the next day without sending a new email. Newsletters can always contain latest information instead of news from the time when the newsletter was sent. And users can interact directly within the email. So the static disadvantage of email towards websites can be equalized with AMP.

In terms of Deliverability, there’s some open points as well: how will dynamic content be evaluated in terms of spam? How to avoid Spam and Phishing to be pushed from the back door? And last but not least: how does tracking and data protection look like for dynamic content in mails?

We will follow the topic closely and let you know when there’s an update that needs your attention.