Wow — the Google team (and friends) just wrapped up AMP Fest 2020 with some huge announcements. Here are my top takeaways, both for early adopters of AMP for Email and those still on the fence.
First, from an execution standpoint, Salesforce Marketing Cloud announced support for sending early next year, though we hear there are some private betas happening soon as well. This unlocks sending capacity for a huge number of companies — previously it has been tricky to find suitable sending platforms. Personally I’m stoked (and not just because Salesforce customers can use Dyspatch to create AMP emails with no code!) — because of the swath of data locked up in Salesforce, the use cases here are ENDLESS. Kudos to Rachel Boyles (and the whole SFMC) who announced this today.
Use cases highlighted by the Salesforce team include setting up a grocery delivery, scheduling an appointment with real-time data, or finding the nearest store to you — all directly within the email.
Next up, we had the announcement that both Yahoo and AOL were adding support for receiving AMP emails. This is coming just weeks after Microsoft announced they were *canceling* their AMP beta test, so it’s very encouraging news for AMP senders and consumers alike. I for one definitely have money on Microsoft joining team #ampforemail again by this time next year.
There are a ton of great updates that make creating AMP emails even better. The size limit for AMP emails has been doubled to 200k, HYPER Collapse has been added so AMP emails can be threaded into one “topic”, and there is now mobile support for Gmail on iOS and Android, which is huge! New warnings have also been added, so if the user is navigating away from the email without submitting their work they will get a warning message – this should further increase conversions and improve the user experience.
Still on the fence about trying AMP for Email? Does a 133% increase in click through (Findomestic) or 27% increase in sales (Ecwid) sound good? Because that’s what some early senders are seeing (and just with basic AMP use cases!)
Not only did we hear about some really compelling marketing case studies, we also heard about some great productivity use cases. When you’re thinking about these, just think about the example of commenting on google docs directly in your email. Google saw a 500% increase in comments when they rolled this out, and this year there are some exciting new ways that businesses are using AMP email to increase productivity.
For example, Guru, a knowledge management system, sends tens of thousands of email notifications every day, and by making these emails dynamic they were able to increase card comment actions by 2.5x, and increase card verifications by 75%! This translates into thousands of additional actions that are helping users be more productive and manage their knowledge base without leaving their inbox.
Another great one was VOGSY, a professional services automation platform. They send email notifications with many different potential actions. The type of productivity emails they send allow their users to complete these actions, such as approvals right in the email. Think about the amount of time saved and the increase in speed of completing workflows. Before AMP the average time to complete an action was one day, VOGSY saw an improvement of 80% in completion time, translating to only hours.
One of the major challenges that we’re still seeing is the difficulty in building AMP emails — it still requires a developer. Shamelessly, that’s where Dyspatch comes in — our platform helps you build AMP (and normal emails) without writing code. Sounds pretty great eh?
Here’s more on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud announcement and how you can get started.
If you didn’t catch the live stream, it’s all available here:
