How to Leverage AMP for Email to Book More Sales Demos

Emails have become an indispensable part of any business. It is the most preferred medium of communication between a business and their employees as well as their customers. In fact, 72% of the brands prefer to use emails to engage with consumers across the customer journey.

The reason behind such importance given to emails is their cost-effectiveness and targeted nature. The introduction of Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) by Google and its application to emails allows you to provide an interactive email experience like never before.

The functionality that AMP has brought to emails is enormous. We are going to learn more about the different ways that you can take advantage of AMP emails for your business later in this article.

What are AMP emails?

Compared to HTML emails, AMP emails have a limited amount of JavaScript to let you add AMP elements. This gives emails two main functionalities: interactive elements and real time updates.

With AMP emails, recipients can interact with the different elements within the email. Recipients also get to see real time updates within the email. 

You can embed interactive elements like forms and comment boxes in the email so that the recipients are not redirected to a different page to submit their responses or perform any other action for that matter.

AMP emails vs HTML emails

AMP emails can be called the modernized version of HTML emails. AMP emails allow for much more functionality and interactivity than their HTML counterparts.

Although HTML emails allow recipients to view pictures, videos, and gifs in the email, it does not allow true interactivity, that is, elements responding to an action by the recipient. 

The most interaction you can have with an HTML email is to view what is in the mail and click a button in the email that will lead you to another landing page to perform the desired action.

AMP emails enable the recipients to do this within the email itself. It lets you embed forms, calendars, carts, etc., within the mail. This allows the recipients to provide their feedback or book a meeting without having to leave their inboxes.

By eliminating unnecessary redirects, AMP emails simplify the process for the customers and provide a seamless experience.

Source: Emailmonday.com

Challenges of sales outreach with text emails

Sales outreach with text emails can be more difficult as compared to its more advanced counterpart – AMP emails. We know how important a one-to-one meeting with your prospects can be. So it is preferable to make their entire meeting experience seamless.

Using text emails to book these meetings can be a difficult task. Fixing a date and time for the meeting in itself can be very confusing. You may go ahead by asking the prospects a suitable time and date window, check your open slots, and then suggest an exact date and time, which is still liable to their acceptance. It may take a few emails back and forth for the two parties to come to an agreement. Also, not every potential customer is going to have the same level of patience.

The dynamic nature of AMP emails helps by allowing the prospects to see the available slots and choose one of them, making it a one-time hit.

Plain text sales emails can only provide the recipients with different links that they can visit for performing different actions like registering themselves on the website, requesting more information, or making a purchase. Basically, none of these tasks can be performed within the inbox. This may make a simple task appear like a long, tedious one. 

The email only serves as a source of information from the sender to the prospects. It has no other function like the ability to take actions within the email or to collect information from the potential customers. AMP allows you to embed a feedback system, checkbox, forms, etc., within the email itself.

There is little to no support for third-party integration in HTML emails. Apps like Calendly are a handy tool for booking meetings and are supported by AMP emails, which makes the entire process much easier (more on that later).

How do AMP emails help?

• Interactive elements

Interactive elements are a unique feature of AMP emails. These naturally shift recipients from passively reading the emails to engaging or interacting with them.

These elements can be designed to perform the desired actions within the email itself so the recipient does not have to keep being redirected to different landing pages. You can have a form embedded in the email itself to collect more information about your recipients to provide better service.

You can even have a feedback poll set up at the bottom of the email to help understand how their experience of booking the meeting was. You stretch it to even allowing your recipients to provide their feedback in the embedded comment box.

• Hyper-personalization

AMP emails boast of not just personalization, but hyper-personalization. You may have a similar scope of personalization of subject lines and addressing the recipients by their name with HTML emails. AMP emails take it all to another level.

AMP emails can refer to the present in the database and personalize the emails being sent to them by not just modifying the subject line or using their name to address them, but also modifying the content of the email to keep it most relevant to them.

What this means is that different recipients may receive emails with your strongest performing services or products for the audience of a particular demography. So you can have those services or products advertised within the email that perform the best with the audience of the same gender or age as the recipient. This makes the emails more relevant and consequently more appreciated by the recipients.

• In-mail demo booking forms

AMP emails allow for embedding forms too along with the other interactive elements. This cuts the entire 3 step process of redirecting to a website to fill out a form, choose a date, and then receive a confirmation into one step.

The recipients can simply fill in the necessary details in the embedded form, choose the date and time from the available options, submit and receive a confirmation of the booking all in the same email, without having to be redirected even once.

This makes the experience as well as the booking process seamless and easy as it leads to more bookings.

• Real-time update of emails

Another unique feature of AMP emails is dynamic elements. Dynamic elements are those that get updated in real time.

For instance, while booking a demo, the available slots can be displayed within the mail in real time. Once a slot is booked by one of the recipients, the action will cause an update in all the other mails received by the different recipients.

• Third-party calendar widgets in email

Integration with third-party applications is a very useful AMP email feature. After booking a demo, for instance, the data and time along with further details of the booking can be saved automatically in recipient calendar apps such as Calendly. This data can also be saved in customer relationship management (CRM) programs for future use.

This helps the companies by reminding the potential customers of bookings on time so that there are no wasted slots. Also, this information, date and time of the bookings, is updated automatically in the recipient calendars, an appreciated convenience for them.

Does AMP affect email deliverability?

The short answer is – No.   

The concern over email deliverability with AMP emails arises because of the use of JavaScript and dynamic content. If the content does not render correctly, the email looks unprofessional and can trigger  spam filters, right?

This challenge is solved with an HTML fallback version. If the interactive element, say a form, does not render, it will show a link to a webpage as all other static HTML emails. 

Moreover, emails with higher engagement rates as seen in AMP emails improve your sender reputation. That’s how user interactivity automatically leads to better inbox placement of your emails.  

Finally, AMP emails require all the authentication settings like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF, passed. The emails are more secure and in compliance from inbox service providers, ensuring deliverability. 

Tips to create an initial sales outreach email

AMP emails do bring interactivity to your emails, which is important for better conversions, but it cannot do it alone. Good copy, a value proposition, and a subject line are still important for better conversions. It is important to keep all these in mind for your emails. 

Here are some more tips for successful sales outreach.

1. Write a subject line that is concise, clear, and describes what you have to offer.
2. Include a section where you introduce yourself and your company, why you’re contacting them, and why they would want to connect with you.
3. Create an objective that you want to achieve with the email that you are sending. It could be as small as getting a certain number of bookings or a certain percentage of response.
4. Personalize your email to keep the content precise and relevant to the recipients. You can research your customers to understand them and their preferences better.
5. Provide a call to action (CTA) at the end of the mail that you want your recipients to perform.
6. Create an ideal prospect profile and target the people who fit that profile for better results.
7. Keep the buyer at the center of your mail. Make the mail about the problems that you can solve for the recipients rather than focusing on what you have to offer.
8. Do not annoy the recipients with too frequent emails. Allow some time for actions while being consistent.
9. Provide proof of your company’s previous achievements to create credibility in the eyes of your potential customers.
10. Provide another means of communication for your customers to get in touch with you, like a phone number or a website.
11. Testing your emails is very important as it prevents you from coming across as a company that does not put enough effort in formatting your emails.

Takeaways

Generic outreach mails hardly get the job done. It is difficult to engage prospects with plain text emails and that is a crucial goal in outreach emails.

AMP emails bring a lot to the table in terms of personalization, functionality, adaptability, and accountability. They help young and old businesses alike get the kind of recognition that they desire from their preferred kind of audience.

 

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Aquibur Rahman

Aquibur Rahman is the CEO of Mailmodo, an email marketing solution that enables users to send app-like interactive emails. He has marketing experience in inbound and outbound strategies, SEO, growth, CRO, and marketing automation. He has helped many B2C and B2B brands, including early-stage tech startups to fast-track growth using agile and data-driven marketing processes. When Google released AMP emails, Aquib saw great potential in it for reinventing email marketing. This led him to start Mailmodo to help businesses get better ROI from email marketing.