AMP Emails: Advantages and Disadvantages

Although email marketing has been around for decades, it’s still one of the best ways to reach customers and grow a business. But because email is such an old technology, a few limitations must be considered. For example, most email clients don’t support more complex HTML, which means that images get jumbled up, or links don’t work reliably across devices.

To fix this problem, Google created AMP emails — short for “Accelerated Mobile Pages” — that take advantage of cutting-edge mobile technologies to give emails an enhanced look and feel without sacrificing readability. But what is AMP email? And what does it mean for a company’s marketing?

What Is AMP Email?

Google’s AMP for Email is a relatively new technology. In short, AMP makes it possible to add interactive elements to emails, creating a more webpage-like experience for email recipients.

AMP for Email was an extension of the open-source AMP project, designed to speed up mobile webpages. AMP allows websites to load faster on mobile devices by optimizing them and removing unnecessary code. However, it’s not just used for mobile devices—AMP emails are also optimized for faster loading on desktop computers.

With AMP, marketers can add interactive elements to their emails, facilitating specific user actions in the email itself rather than requiring readers to click through to a website or web application to achieve the same results.

AMP email marketing can be used by both B2B and B2C companies. While its primary purpose is to allow marketers to create more engaging and interactive content, the applications of AMP for email are wide-ranging and could touch upon various business objectives. To better contextualize these uses of AMP email marketing, let’s look at some examples of AMP emails in action.

Clearly, asking ‘What is AMP email?’ opens up a whole can of technical worms. So, let’s turn to some examples to help clarify what AMP email is.

AMP Email Examples

AMP can be used in various ways to make emails more interactive. Here are just some of the ways that marketers are using AMP email to enrich user experiences:

• Creating attractive image carousels to showcase new products
• Embedding forms into emails to quickly gather information and feedback
• Sharing dynamic content from a database in summary form, such as new property listings that were just added to a real estate
• Adding accordion sections for content-heavy emails to prevent readers from becoming overwhelmed with information
• Appending subscription management options to the bottom of the email to save users from having to visit a website

What Are the Advantages of AMP Email?

AMP email is an innovative form of communication that is becoming increasingly popular with famous companies like Pinterest and Expedia, so it certainly has its benefits.

Advantages of AMP email include:

• High rates of engagement vs. traditional emails
• Increased time spent on email
• Dynamic content options with the ability to add automation and personalization
• More secure data technology and processing
• Enhanced customer experience
• Better conversion rates, leading to a higher return on investment
• Improved email deliverability

What Are the Disadvantages of AMP Email?

Demonstrably, AMP email has some clear advantages over traditional email technologies. There are, however, some quite vocal critics of AMP email. Any marketer considering implementing AMP email should also be aware of the potential disadvantages of AMP email.

• Inability to track click-through-rates, which is an industry-standard metric for measuring email campaign performance
• More complex coding requirements than traditional emails built with HTML/CSS
• More extensive quality assurance demands longer approval processes in marketing workflows
• Potential for new hacking methods to infiltrate interactive elements
• The high expense of replacing traditional email, which still works perfectly well
• Typically only works well with the Gmail client, which significantly restricts its potential use in large email campaigns with readers with multiple email client types
• Even in browsers, there are concerns about the readability of AMP emails (for example, Microsoft Edge and Firefox may not display AMP emails properly depending on how they were deployed in the account’s code base)
• Technologists have questioned whether the technology is actually user-friendly or whether it is a needless ‘innovation’ with limited practical use

Is AMP Email Suitable for Every Business?

As exciting and innovative as AMP email marketing is, it might not be suitable for all business types.

AMP email seems most appropriate for B2C businesses with attractive products and other content to showcase in their emails. It is also suitable for eCommerce companies due to the extensive cart management and payment technologies that can be integrated into email bodies.

For B2B marketers, AMP may not be as useful. The fact remains that traditional HTML/CSS emails do work, so there is an extra burden for those in control of marketing budgets to prove that making the switch to AMP email marketing is worth the expense.

Making the switch to AMP email can be a challenge for marketing and development teams, so executives need to ensure they assess the pros and cons of this type of email marketing carefully against their organization’s goals and customer needs prior to implementation.