Emails still play a major role in digital marketing today. Even though consumers browse the web from their smartphones or tablets, they continuously check their email for new promotions, deals, and events. That’s why it’s so important for your brand to focus on open rates for your email marketing campaign. More often than not, promotional emails go unopened and unread, reducing the impact of your email marketing campaign.
How can you get more people to open your emails? What makes your customers more or less likely to open your brand’s emails?
These are basic questions that you need to answer if you want to make the biggest impact with your email marketing campaign. One of the major factors that influences a consumer’s decision to open an email is the sender. In this post, we’ll go over how and why your brand should determine the optimal sender for your emails.
Sender’s Reputation Matters
There’s often debate about whether promotional emails should come directly from the brand, or from a specific person. However, there’s no steadfast rule as to which is better in every situation. You need to determine your target audience and what they need. If you’re trying to raise brand awareness, it could be better to have your company name as the sender. However, if you’re a smaller business and your recipients are familiar with a specific salesperson or customer service representative, having your email come from a specific person could make a greater impact. A good balancing point is to have your email come from a person but also specify “from X” to name the brand.
Using Data to Test Your Sender
When you’re torn about who should be the sender for your brand’s emails, turn to the data. One way to make a data-driven decision is to run A/B tests. The important thing to consider for A/B testing is that you should only change one variable. That means if you’re testing out the sender’s name, an example of your two versions might be “Mike Lark” and “Mike from Skyrush Marketing”. After you create your two versions, you can test them out and collect data on which one had the higher open rate and CTR.
The “From” Email Address
Just because you found the optimal sender name, doesn’t mean that you’ve perfected your email. Of course, there are a variety of factors that go into email marketing open rates and CTRs, but the other one we are going to focus on here relates directly to the sender name – the from email address. Here are a few best practices when selecting your from email address:
- Don’t use a free webmail address – Instead of using Yahoo, Outlook, or Gmail, opt for an email registered at your company’s domain. This adds credibility to your brand.
- Have a reply address – When someone receives an email that says “no reply”, it makes them wonder if the information is relevant to them. If they have questions about the content, who are they supposed to ask? How can they get more information?
- Match your from email address to your sender name – The from email address should be similar to the sender’s name. This demonstrates consistency and eliminates confusion on the recipients’ part.
Once you’ve determined the optimal sender and from email address, you’re well on your way to optimizing your email marketing campaign. Keep in mind, these are just the first steps – there are still other factors to continuously monitor and update to ensure that your email marketing campaign makes the greatest possible impact.
Learn More About Email Marketing
At Skyrush Marketing, we have a team dedicated to email marketing. Our team takes advantage of the many benefits of email marketing, such as its cost effectiveness, micro-targeting, customizability, viral capabilities, and measurable analytics, in order to get your brand quality results quickly. We work with a variety of industries including law, automotive, B2B, and medical.