AMP for Email Brings a Real Time, Interactive Web Experience To Your Customer’s Inbox

Marketing emails often have a laundry list of products that are disorganized and take up a lot of space in the body of the message. Readers have to scroll through everything and then click to the brand’s website to get more information. In short, it takes a lot of effort to find what you want.

Interactive email solves that issue.

Readers can swipe through galleries near the top of the message to see real-time availability of different product colors, sizes, and styles. Then they can use an appointment scheduler within the email to book time with a virtual assistant. In short, it’s a supercharged and streamlined email experience that helps customers complete their intended action in as few clicks as possible.

Salesforce has been adding interactive email capabilities to its marketer toolset, starting with the Interactive Email Form Block in 2020. Now, in the January 2021 Marketing Cloud release, there’s support for AMP for Email, a tool for creating dynamic, interactive emails that your customers will love.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source language created by Google used to make email interactive. AMP for Email is a huge help for marketers, as it enables customer interaction directly in the inbox (without having to click and follow the email through to a web page).

With AMP, you can create forms in the email message that collect data. And better still, an AMP email automatically updates with real-time content whenever the reader opens it. For example, rather than sending multiple emails to track shipping progress, a single email will contain the most current shipping status every time the customer reads it.

The AMP use cases in email are just getting started, but here are a few we’re excited about:

• More opportunities to engage subscribers. Carousels show multiple pieces of content in the same area of the email while giving viewers the ability to click, swipe, or tap through products or images. 
• Easier collecting of customer insights. In-email forms with AMP can receive customer information like profile data, product reviews, and sales leads directly from embedded forms in a message.
• Two-way interaction enablement. AMP for Email’s appointment scheduling capability brings together two components: real-time data and in-email interaction. Only available appointments are shown, and the customer can book without leaving their inbox.

Corinna Cohen, a Marketing Cloud platform developer at footwear company Caleres, has already started adding AMP into her emails. And she’s thinking of new ways to innovate. She’s started with quick wins, such as building AMP elements that can be reused across messages and introducing new functionality that appeals to email users of all ages.

“Our audience spans teenagers through much older generations who go shopping for shoes,” said Cohen. “We want to make sure that we don’t become overly technical for any of our users. One of our goals with AMP is to mimic website experiences to make it easy to engage, like with carousels.”

She has also started looking into more advanced ways to use digital lookbooks instead of  hard-copy catalogues or gift guides.

“We’ve wanted lookbooks in email within retail for years, so now that I have that as an option, I’m thinking of fun ways to use it,” Cohen said in a recent Salesforce webinar. “I’m trying to figure out this scenario: How could my son or daughter circle a cool pair of shoes they want in an email, and send it to grandma and grandpa before a birthday or the holidays?” she added.

Though AMP is a relatively new framework, Salesforce is going beyond just supporting it as an email type. We’re also creating tools, resources, and content around how to use it and use it well.