Microsoft announce on the Tech Community site that Outlook.com would be discontinuing the support for AMP for email as of October 1st, 2020. AMP support will be replaced with new Actionable Messages.
The announcement update reads as follows:
Update (September 9th, 2020): Today we are announcing that, based on the results and feedback we received, the developer preview of AMP for Email will end on October 1st.
After that date, AMP for Email will be turned off in Outlook.com. Emails that used AMP will instead render using regular HTML; there is nothing extra email senders need to do for this fallback to work automatically. If email senders want to send dynamic emails to Outlook users, we encourage you to leverage Actionable Messages instead.
What are Actionable Messages?
After reading through of the documentation Actionable Messages are using Schema to build interactivity into the content of the messages. The schema solution allows for a number of interactive features that include user surveys or polling, appointment management, or event scheduling (i.e. add your flight to the calendar).
Microsoft has also provided a tool which exports the proper JSON code to be used when sending messages, along with a series of sample actions within their Actionable Message Designer.
Choosing schema over AMP?
Making the right call for your emails can be hard. It’s best to consider your exact list distribution and consider how you want to proceed. According to the 2019 Global Benchmark report from 250ok Validity, Outlook was calculated to have about 9% of email recipients (13% if you include O365), Gmail has 31% of recipients, and Verizon Media holding on to about 15% of the market. This means that even with Outlook dropping AMP support almost half of recipients would still be able to receive AMP emails. However, all three of these mailbox providers would still support schema.
Where will you choose to focus your time?
* Image source: Microsoft
