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How AWeber Uses AMP for Email

Trevor Rawls

Digital Marketing Manager, Email on Acid

Dave Stys

Technical Product Manager, AWeber

Jeni McGuigan

Email Designer, AWeber

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WIN SOME SPLAT FEST SWAG!

TWO WINNERS WILL BE CHOSEN AT THE END OF THIS WEBINAR

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Dave Stys

Product Manager, AWeber

25+ years of both marketing and technical experience. He loves making all kinds of things from mobile apps to kayaks. Dave is AWeber's local expert on dynamic content, AMP for Email, and sender authentication. He also works alongside the email delivery team to stop spam messages from reaching subscribers.

@dstys

davejs@aweber.com

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Jeni McGuigan

Email Designer at AWeber

10+ years of design experience, including over 5 years specific to email design. She manages the email template library at AWeber and is currently focused on refreshing the library as well as adding creative templates to our Landing Page builder.

@email_jedi

jenih@aweber.com

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Bookmark This Page

All of the slides and resources are available here:

https://go.aweber.com/splat-fest

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TOP SECRET DEMONSTRATION

This email will change the world.

Or at least it will change something in the real world.

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What you’ll learn today

IoT (internet of things)
Email in motion
Making email more social
Live financial data
An e-commerce shop

Workshop - interactive forms in your email.

Dave -Truly Interactive email is finally here, and we don’t just want to talk about theoreticals. We want to SHOW you what is possible today with real life examples in our very own inboxes. And I think you’re going to fall in love with what you see.

If this presentation inspires you, we welcome you to use our code examples and other resources to help you get started with AMP for email in your own campaigns.

First, we’ll quickly introduce you to what AMP for email is, and explain why it’s a safe bet for widespread adoption.
We’ll explain how interactivity will impact your overall email marketing strategy and change the KPIs you track.
AWeber is using AMP in our own marketing campaigns and it is driving gains in engagement. So we’ll show you what we’ve been up to.
And most of our time today will be spent sharing a whopping 8 cool demonstrations that are meant to show you just what’s possible.

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What is AMP for Email?

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Interactive Email is AMP for Email

https://amp.dev/about/email/

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Jetpack, Hoverboard, Flying Car

Always Up to Date

Built for Interactivity

Check out AMP for Email: The 411 for more info

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Open Source Collaboration

Gmail

Mail.ru

Yahoo! Mail

(VMG)

Outlook.com

Dave - >1 minute

But before we continue, I do want to point out that AMP for Email is an open source project which has participation by many key players. This is what encourages me to believe that the technology will see widespread adoption.

It’s a unique situation where competitors are collaborating in the interest of advancing email together. So while this technology isn’t available everywhere today, it is catching on quickly and will almost certainly become universally accepted in the same way HTML email finally become the norm rather than the exception.

And here’s a real bonus for email designers: Because AMP for Email adheres to fairly strict set of rules, your email design is almost guaranteed to act and render the same way in every inbox that supports AMP.

Last year, Microsoft announced they are discontinuing their support for AMP to develop their own proprietary technology. It’s unfortunate, but I’m placing my bet on an open standard that can work for everyone.

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Email in 3 parts

Plain Text

HTML

AMP

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How does interactivity affect your conversion strategy?

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Shortening the conversion path

AMP

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Amazing Demonstrations

With playgrounds and code samples!

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Adding motion to email

CSS Animations
Transformations
Translations
(no keyframe)

code sample

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Like Button

Having users interact with a quick click is a great way to gather feedback and check engagement. Think about how on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram you can interact with a post just by clicking a little heart icon.

This helps show the content curator the types of interests their audience has quickly and easily. So let’s do that in email too!

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Demo - Social Quiz

Cue interactivity
Engage your audience
Gather feedback
Understand preferences
Get new content ideas

Code sample

Jeni

Speaker Notes: I sell products on my website and I want a fun way to promote some of my top selling products because I always generate sales when I get to do that. So, I created a quiz asking my audience, which of these is our top selling product? (Or could do this with one product in different colors). People get to guess by choosing an option. And as a bonus - anyone who participates gets a discount code they can use right away.

How was it done?

Everything happens within the email itself. There are no forms to submit and certainly no remote APIs.
AMP selectors are used to detect a response to the quiz, and based on what is pressed, the email updates itself to show correct and incorrect responses.
In other words, pressing a selector updates the CSS of specific elements in the email to get the desired final state

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Demo - Social Polls

Quickly and easily find out your reader’s preference with a poll!

This is a great quick way to grab the reader’s preference to send them a special offer.

Code sample

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Stock Prices

Provide real-time information when the reader opens the email.

Code sample

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Ecommerce Shop Inside an Email

Why not let your customers do a little window shopping? In the inbox!

Offering a sale? Update the products as they sell out for readers that didn’t get to the message yet, so they have an offer too!

Code sample

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Workshop - adding a form

Let’s build an email someone gets after registering for an event. The email confirms your registration but also offers you a free event t-shirt.

The form asks for your shirt size, preferred color, and shipping address. The form is submitted and viola!

You have all the information to mail the attendee their shirt!

Click below to check out the full tutorial here:

How to Make Your Emails Feel Special With Interactive Forms

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What we’ve done...

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Newsletter Strategy + Success

Our goal: increase newsletter engagement in 2019 and beyond.

How? By transforming the blog digest into an educational newsletter subscribers crave week after week.

From October 2019-March 2020, engagement on AMP elements in the newsletter went up 225%.

Jeni

1.5 minutes (possible to combine this slide with the next one? or just move quickly through them?)

After our initial experimentation with AMP, we were pretty impressed. For that reason we decided to begin incorporating interactivity in our own marketing newsletters.

The first challenge we ran into was subtly educating our readers to pick up on the fact that our emails are now more dynamic. Frankly, the first time readers filled out our new feedback form a few people were really surprised by the new interaction. One replied with “What is this wizardry?”. He couldn’t believe the form didn’t navigate him out the inbox.

After introducing AMP we could see the engagement on the elements have gone up 225% from our first AMP email. Specifically, there was a large spike after AMP was available on mobile apps/devices & within Outlook. We expect this stat to increase as even more mailbox provider support AMP in the future.

====PREVIOUS NOTES====

Within FWD: Thinking we are always looking for ways to go beyond with a surprise and delight within email. When we heard about AMP, we thought using it our own newsletter was the best place to get started and we were just looking to increase our subscriber engagement.

Generally in an email, your KPI’s are tracked by deliverability, open rates, clicks and then followed by conversions for an email. However, AMP changes that as the user no longer needs to leave the email to complete a task and the conversions can happen right in the message.

One thing we noticed after our first AMP email, was we still wanted to be able to track engagement or our readers. AMP elements allow you to auto-track the email address the message was sent to that is completing the action. We can see reports on who submitted the feedback, choose an answer on a quiz or poll, or clicked a reaction icon at the bottom of the email.

We did include instructional text, icons, and gifs to allow our users to see which elements AMP supported and outlined that they could interact with the element right in the email.

After introducing AMP we could see the engagement on the elements have gone up 225% from our first AMP email. Specifically, there was a large spike after AMP was available on mobile apps/devices & within Outlook. We expect this stat to increase as even more mailbox provider support AMP in the future.

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AMP at AWeber

We swapped out the link to a web based feedback form, with an <amp-form>.

This is an awesome way to quickly gain feedback from users without leaving their inbox.

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AMP at AWeber

Next, we updated our reactions widget, to support AMP features in the email directly.

It even pops up a form to enter more information!

JENI - 1 minute

Since we had good luck with our first form, we decided to keep going. We’ve always included smiley and sad face icons at the end of our emails to gauge satisfaction with the content we’re sharing. We tracked this through unique links on the images initially. So we decided to amp-lify this component which now is able to collect the reader’s opinion and also ask for a few words about why the feel that way.

We find we’re much more likely to get a response once the reader realizes she isn’t going to be sent out of her inbox just to give us a thumbs up… or more information on what they liked or would like to see moving forward.

====previous content====

From there, we upgraded our sentiment widget. This allowed the user to react and see how many other readers were reacting to the email message also in real time! We tossed in a feedback form also, so the reader could share more information on why they choose the reaction they did. We love reading the responses and following up with our readers directly!

Dave wrote an awesome article on getting this set up on Medium.com, there is a link in the slidedeck for you and on the Additional Resources page.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/interactive-forms-add-a-special-power-up-to-your-email-marketing-45d165bb6615

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AMP at AWeber

Next, we added an interactive poll for users to join in on.

Users could see in real-time how others were responding as well.

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AMP at AWeber

Followed by including more options for users to interact with by a Quiz.

It marks your selection, as well as the correct answer, and provide more information that can direct the subscriber to a website.

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AMP at AWeber

We’ve even added an image carousel to our drag and drop editor.

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AMP at AWeber

From there we have expanded AMP, to use it in our new subscriber notification emails.

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Time for Questions and Answers

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… AND THE WINNERS ARE...

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Thanks for joining us!

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