The Google train keeps on going and this year, one of the updates will be an extension of Accelerated Mobile Pages to email. This is a very exciting development for any company using email marketing. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are poised to dramatically improve both engagement and conversion statistics for email marketing, and as a company providing AMP Website Development, we are excited to take advantage of this rollout as it becomes available.
What exactly is AMP?
Accelerated mobile pages, or AMP for short, is an open source program built on AMP HTML, an open coding framework based on existing web technologies. It was announced by Google in late 2015, and AMP webpages first appeared to web users in February 2016. Numerous publishers and technology companies, including Twitter and WordPress, were the first employees of the project.
The project was based on the idea of increasing internet speed, especially for mobile internet. To reduce loading times, AMP cuts HTML tags and reduces page rendering, which basically reduces the weight of your web pages. It would be like running with a heavy backpack or running without; you are much faster.
This is combined with Google’s content delivery network (CDN), called Google AMP Cache. The cache is a proxy-based global CDN that can illuminate high speeds because the global network can shorten the distance between request and delivery.
There are plenty of benefits for any business when using AMP which is why as top web developer we have added AMP website development as one of our core offerings.
How AMP drives email conversions
The idea behind combining AMP with email is to help modernize it and make it more useful. By adding more functionality, Google has determined that they can increase engagement. This would be achieved by allowing different tasks to be performed from within the emails themselves, rather than performing those tasks outside of the email client.
An example they gave was to confirm an email account during a transaction with a website. Instead of clicking on a link to open a new browser tab for the confirmation step, you instead had direct access to the confirmation page itself.
The overall goal is to eliminate steps and clicks that a user has to perform in specific areas to create a more efficient system for both customers and businesses. While the primary focus will always be on Google’s customers, which appears to be the bulk of the population, businesses will gain an advantage by reducing the number of emails they need to generate to complete processes and transactions.
One drawback to email contact has always been inbox overload, and extending AMP to email should reduce the backlog of emails users have to navigate. In addition, reducing the number of clicks required to complete tasks will increase email marketing engagement. From a content marketing perspective, AMP allows users to immediately receive and access content in the email itself. More importantly, this functionality focuses on the ability of mobile users to easily access and view emails on different devices.
A few major industry players, such as Pinterest and Booking.com, have already started implementing AMP in their emails to improve their overall service level.
Other benefits of using AMP
There are already numerous advantages to using AMP in addition to the email extension that many companies will find useful:
Ad Revenue: Ads can directly affect the loading speed of a website, especially when using third party ads. In some cases, ads not only load slowly, but also prevent other elements from loading until they are finished. This has led to a ‘walk the line’ approach to balancing ads and page speed to ensure customers remain satisfied. If a company uses AMP for its site and uses an ad network with the AMP ad extended component, the loading speed is generally much faster. This increase makes the use of ads easier without a decrease in site performance.
SEO – Customer satisfaction and page loading speed are ranking factors that Google takes into account in their SERP results. Reducing loading times by even a second can not only improve SEO because of that ranking factor, but it also increases customer satisfaction thanks to the improved user experience.
Analysis – A key point of the AMP program is to reduce the redundancy of the website to increase speed by shortening HTML tags. This also has the added benefit of creating more streamlined analytics as a single set of tags is now used for data reporting.
The bottom line is that the Accelerated Mobile Project has proven to be extremely effective for companies looking for better website performance. The ability to increase email engagement and conversions with Accelerate Mobile Pages is just another reason to start using AMP if you’re not already.
