Learn to Love Your “From”
Posted by Dave McCue on September 16th, 2009
There are those who fear change, and others who can’t live without it (I know people who sport a different hairstyle—or hair color—just about every time I see them). Email marketers often fall into the same categories, with some being reluctant to divert from their “tried and true” formula, and others constantly switching things up to keep things interesting. But even if you fall into the latter group, I would strongly advise that you learn to love your “From” name and address—or your need for change could backfire.
Looking through my email inbox earlier today, I noticed a message in my Junk folder that appeared to be from a trusted sender, Sharpie.
Now, if this was the first message I’d ever received from the sender in question, I would have simply chalked it up to a deliverability issue and marked them as a trusted sender for future messages. However, I actually remembered marking a previous email as being safe, so I dug back through my archives to see what might have been the cause.
As it turns out, my memory wasn’t entirely accurate; I hadn’t just marked one email from Sharpie as being safe, I had marked two. How did I know this? Because each message used a different From address:
Now, if you go back to the Junk example, you’ll notice that this message also uses a unique From address that was unfamiliar to my email client. So over the course of three messages (one each in July, August and September), I was asked to add the sender to my safelist all three times. After realizing this, I almost didn’t mark the third message as safe because I thought it might be a scam—but then, sometimes writing a blog involves taking some risks.
The third message, as before, turned out to be a legitimate message, but I can’t help but wonder how many of those messages never made it out of the Junk folder. As I wrote in a previous post, for recipients to label your message as safe or add you to their address book requires a certain level of trust. It’s pushing your luck to make that same request more than once and expect the same results.
If you hate the idea of your messages not being opened, learn to love your From.
