Travel industry news : newsletters with AMP for E-mail. What is AMP for Email ? Today, we’re bringing the power of AMP to email through the Gmail Developer Preview of “AMP for Email.” This new spec will be a powerful way for developers to create more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.

Like Doodle, Booking.com takes advantage of AMP’s dynamic content to deliver users a better experience in email. In this case, it relates to their search for lodging. As you see in this first email, Booking.com offers its users a room recommendation with an image. But, one thumbnail? That’s hardly all you need to see to decide on a room, but unlike static email, which would force you to click through to the listing page to see the photos of this apartment, AMP for email allows the user to click the arrow on the edge of the image to slide to the next photo, seen below, The user gets a more informed view of the listing without ever having to leave the email. While an email slider like this can be created with CSS, it’s been called a far smoother experience with AMP for email.

AMP for Email is currently exclusively available for Gmail users. While Gmail is one of the most popular email clients with 26% of all emails opened in a Gmail inbox, on average, the audience for consumers that could see AMP-powered emails is limited. And it could be lower depending on your own audience. There’s little support from ESPs: Emails using AMP aren’t like traditional emails, so, they can’t be built the traditional way. If your email service provider can’t support the technology needed to create them, you may find yourself unable to.

What are the benefits in Email Marketing for the Travel Industry? In the travel industry, especially for travel agencies and online travel booking portals, email marketing is the most important direct communication channel for getting in touch with their customers. There already plenty of good reasons to use email as your number one channel. But email is lacking dynamic elements. The recipient has to be referred to a website in order to perform further action. However, this technological gap is going to be closed rather soon with Google’s AMP for Email. Behavioral targeting: Based on a first email open the following email opens can already lead to a more accurate choice of products for the subscriber based on click behavior, opening time, device or spatial data.

Schema.org is a markup vocabulary for structured data founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It is actively maintained by an open community process. In search engine optimization (SEO), Schema.org is commonly used as additional semantic markup inside web pages to help making a website’s search result snippets stand out and eventually perform better. It is also used in other popular forms of structured data in digital marketing, for instance in Facebook’s Open Graph and in Twitter Cards. In Email Marketing, however, Schema.org is still a ‘secret weapon’ that helps you to stand out from regular emails sent by your competitors.

Microsoft provides an Email Development Dashboard to test their Schema.org enriched ‘actionable messages’ for the Outlook product range. Using Microsoft’s Card Playground, you are able to test sending actionable messages to your own inbox.

A quite similar process is necessary if you want to see the Microsoft Outlook way of Schema.org implemention in action. You must go through through Microsoft’s registration and verification process before you can use the actionable messages in Outlook: Microsoft’s email sender guidelines. Schema.org is primarily used in Gmail and Outlook, summing up to a substantial email client market share in the business world. However, it can be speculated, though, that these enhancements will drive innovation even further, also affecting other email service global players and their email clients such as Apple Mail. Read extra on email marketing trends at The mail is being AMP-ed.

Email marketers already use two different MIME types to create emails for the HTML part (text/html) and plain-text part (text/plain) of an email. This is why, in your ESP, you have to create an HTML version and a plain-text version of every email you send. For AMP-powered emails, you’ll have to add a third MIME-type to your email. And that’s the problem: Without ESPs adding support for this third MIME-type, there is physically no way of creating and sending AMP-powered emails.

Email developers have long craved the kind of coding standardization that the web has had for years. Despite efforts from the email community, that standardization still hasn’t happened. AMP-powered emails rely on client-specific coding—again, it’s only supported by Gmail. That is another step away from email coding standardization, and will require email developers to learn another specific skill set in order to simply build an email.

But not everyone is convinced we need this. TechCrunch says it’s a terrible idea “borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage rather than user needs.” Ouch. To help you make your own mind up, this article will cover some of the key information you need to know about working with the new AMP for Email spec, its potential for modernizing email, and possible use cases for designers, marketers and content creators.