How KFC Created AMP Emails with Interactive Elements in 3 Days

Goal Implement email campaigns with AMP technology
Team Digital and CRM Manager from KFC, MGCom agency, Mindbox manager
Term 2 days
Results Received permission from postal services, created and sent AMP campaigns
Business scale21,000 restaurants. Several million clients in the database
Noteworthy feature Interactive elements in the email: order form with Buy button, product carousel, slider, subscription forms, animation, sidebar

An international chain of fast food restaurants, founded in 1930

Nikita Zakharin, Digital and CRM Manager at KFC

KFC is a chain of fast-food restaurants with several million customer profiles in its database. Their email marketing communications with customers are managed by the MGCom marketing agency.

For this project, KFC and MGCom decided to try something new – the team created bulk email campaigns with with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology, which supports interactive elements inside emails. The entire project took under 3 days to complete: 2 working days to get permission from email service providers and 5 hours to complete the coding.

In this story, we'll explore the campaign in more detail, including:

what it looks like
how it differs from a regular everyday email
how it was set up

This article will be useful if you're exploring AMP technology and are considering implementing it your campaigns. We'll be covering all the prepwork steps: from obtaining permission, working on the design and coding, to setting up sending in the interface. Nikita Zakharin, Digital and CRM Manager at KFC, will be sharing his feedback regarding the completed project.

AMP emails and their features

AMP emails differ from ordinary email campaigns as you they allow you to add interactive elements. These can be in the form of an order form with an “Order” button, a product carousel, sliders, subscription forms, animations, a sidebar, etc. In its first AMP email, KFC created an interactive showcase of meals.

Testimonial

Continuing the legacy of Colonel Sanders, we are working to ensure that as many customers as possible have the opportunity to try our signature chicken meals.

The email channel plays an important role in our communication with customers. Thanks to AMP, we received another opportunity to talk about meals without making emails longer and to make the content more interactive.

This is an important step in the development of our email marketing strategy and we will continue to experiment with AMP and other innovations. If you’re put off by the idea of approving AMP with email services, please don’t worry. It’s a chore that only needs to be done once, and its result will definitely pay off in the future.

Nikita Zakharin, Digital and CRM Manager at KFC

What we did

In order to send a campaign with interactive elements, you need to get permission from email services that support AMP, design the email in two versions (with and without AMP), and set up the campaign in Mindbox.

Getting permission

AMP currently supports Mail and Google. We requested permission from Mail, and after 2 working days, we received our requested permission.

Design and coding

The coding for AMP emails differs from ordinary emails. An AMP email contains a limited JavaScript markup for embedding interactive elements. You will also need to design a standard version of the email. It will be shown to recipients whose email clients do not support AMP-technology. It took MGCom about 5 hours to complete the design and coding stage.

Campaign without AMP with GIF animation

Campaign with AMP and interactive slider

Setup in the interface and sending

In Mindbox, AMP coding is added to an email on the campaign setup page. It is as easy as coding a regular HTML template. If you send an AMP version of the email and the recipient’s email client supports this format, then this customer will see the AMP content. If the recipient’s email client does not support this technology, then your customer will see an ordinary email. This happens automatically.

HTML and AMP versions of emails are loaded through the platform interface without involving development

HTML and AMP versions of emails are uploaded to the platform without the need to involve any developers

Conclusion and our next steps

Together with MGCom, KFC made the first bulk AMP email campaign. In the future, we are going to add new useful AMP elements for the audience and work on reliably measuring the effectiveness of AMP emails compared to regular emails.