Why Send AMP Emails With ActionKit?

We’ve been enthusiastic about AMP For Email for a very long time. It opens up a lot of possibilities for simplifying user experiences by treating your emails more like web pages, with dynamically updating content and interactive elements like image carousels, accordion sections, and lightboxes.

Plus, AMP lets your members send in their form submissions & other data directly from the inbox, so you can collect survey responses, event RSVPs, and petition comments without sending members to a webpage first.

The result can be better engagement and higher conversion rates, leading to longer time-on-list, better deliverability, and more advocacy actions.

We were very excited when ActionKit launched its support for AMP emails, and we recently helped a client get up and running with this feature.

There are a few steps involved before you can start sending AMP emails. Here’s what we learned.

What AMP won’t do for you

Most importantly, AMP For Email still isn’t universally supported. :-( Support for AMP is provided at the email client level, and to date only Gmail (on both desktop and mobile) and a handful of other inbox providers implement it. Notably, Apple does not. And even within Gmail, individual users have the option to turn it off.

There’s a handy chart at CanIUse.com, which estimates current support at about 16% of end user traffic in general.

Of course, AMP support among your subscribers will vary depending on the composition of your list, and could be considerably higher.

To get a read on whether this is a fit for you, check what percentage of your subscribers have an address @gmail.com or @yahoo.com — we’ve seen large lists where it’s at 55% or even more.¹

Regardless, you should think of AMP as an optional progressive enhancement that will provide a subset of your list with more dynamic and interactive features, while the rest of your list still gets your conventional HTML or plaintext emails.

Also: AMP For Email does not support interactive video elements. Sorry — you’ll still need to use workarounds like play button image overlays and animated GIFs.

Lastly, don’t expect to embed donation forms in your AMP emails. While this is theoretically possible, it’s not realistic in practice because of the security implications and compliance requirements involved in collecting payment methods. Engaging emails with enticing links to donate pages (using ActBlue Express and other one-click donation methods where it makes sense) remains the way to go here.

What AMP will do for you

For the portion of your list using Gmail and Yahoo Mail, there’s a lot you can do with AMP! Some ideas:

• Embed a petition or short ActionKit survey directly in your mailing. When users fill in their answers or provide a personal comment and submit the form, their responses will be recorded and they’ll see a thank you message — or an ActBlue Express button — directly in the same email they’ve already opened.

• For longer surveys, you can also implement multi-step data collection: show the user a single question with a stack of buttons or a form field, and then when they answer it, display a series of additional questions one at a time until the user completes the survey. You can even submit as you go, capturing partial responses if people walk away.

• If you’re organizing in-person events using ActionKit, you can show the user a list of nearby events, with their current signup count kept up to date in real time. Then let the user select an event to RSVP for, or opt to register as host for a new event in their area if they’d prefer, all from the email.

• Show an up-to-date list of recent donors or petition signers in the user’s region, with first names, donation amounts, and timestamps to indicate that it’s real-time. Or generate dynamic progress meters and calculations like average donation amounts in a campaign or number of signers still needed per state.

• Use horizontal scrolling carousels to tell a story in images, link to your current campaigns, feature a series of candidates the user can opt to donate to, or display survey choices.

• Send quizzes and polls for users to take directly from their inbox. After they submit their responses, show the user’s scored results or a live breakdown of how your members are currently responding. (And then add a share prompt so they can drum up support for their preferred result!)

Sending AMP emails without ActionKit

If you’re using another email platform instead of ActionKit, you probably won’t be able to send AMP emails directly from your existing toolset. Salesforce Marketing Cloud does support AMP, but it’s a notable exception. As far as we’re aware, AMP is entirely unsupported in Action Network, Engaging Networks, EveryAction, and Luminate.

If you’re using one of those platforms, you’ll need to send AMP emails from a third-party platform in parallel. Options here include Mailmodo, Dyspatch, and Stripo, among others, but note that we haven’t tried any of these.

Ready to get started?

In our next posts, we’ll walk you through everything that’s involved in getting set up and authorized to send AMP emails.