Track, confirm or RSVP: Google Email Actions & Highlights are here
All MailerSend users can now enable Google’s Email Actions and Highlights directly within their emails. This update is designed to make your emails more professional and engaging, allowing you to improve the experience for your customers or users.
What are Email Actions and Highlights?
The Email Actions and Highlights feature (sometimes called Inbox Actions) allows you to enhance your emails with structured data.
Actions appear as prominent CTAs (Calls-To-Action) or interactive elements that enable recipients to perform tasks directly from their inbox. For example:
Manage a booking or reservation
Highlights, on the other hand, extract key information from your emails, displaying it in a more visible and user-friendly format at the top of your email. Think:
Flight details
Accommodation bookings
Restaurant reservations
Event details
Order statuses
And a lot more!
Here’s an example that uses both highlights and actions.
Why use Actions and Highlights in your emails?
This free Google feature is a great way to enhance your emails and improve your transactional messaging performance, and here’s why:
Improved user experience
Transactional emails are a key element of the user experience, and actions and highlights allow your messages to fit even more seamlessly by making them more user-friendly and convenient. This leads to improved customer satisfaction.
Increased engagement
With clickable actions and visually engaging information highlights, you reduce the friction for people to be able to interact with your content, which leads to higher rates of conversion. Imagine being able to add a recommended video to a queue with a single click in the inbox, versus opening an email, clicking a link, and then adding the video.
More visibility in the inbox
Actions and highlights can help your messages stand out in a crowded inbox with visual, interactive elements. They can even give recipients timely reminders by displaying cards at the top of the inbox when a significant date or time approaches, like when a package is supposed to arrive.
Better workflows with faster interaction
People should be able to complete workflows or perform tasks in the least number of steps. Actions and highlights help to make this possible by allowing recipients to check in for a flight, confirm a dinner reservation, or verify an email address with a single click from the inbox.
More professional, trustworthy communication
Google only enables Actions and Highlights for verified senders who follow their guidelines. So, not only do the added visual and interactive elements make your transactional emails more professional, they also signal that you’re a trusted sender.
How to get started
On the technical side, implementing Google’s Email Actions and Highlights is relatively straightforward: you’ll simply need to add the relevant structured data to your emails. You will, however, need to meet Google’s requirements, register, and receive approval for them to be enabled.
Step 1: Check Google’s guidelines for email sender quality and make sure you meet them. Many of the guidelines are considered sender best practices anyway, so there is a good chance you already have most of them in place
Step 2: Add the structured data to your email. Google allows the use of both Microdata and JSON-LD, however, if you are using a MailerSend template, you must use Microdata, as JSON scripts are not supported
Step 3: Send an email to Google from your production servers
Step 4: Register with Google and wait for approval or feedback
Try out Email Actions and Highlights now
This Google feature is available for all MailerSend users, and with minimal technical implementation, can make a big impact on your user experience. Give it a go!