Email “From” Field: Calling Card or Attention Grabber?
November 5th, 2008 by Doug BrightHave we really dissected email marketing so thoroughly that we’re talking about best practices for “From” fields? In a word, yes.
Monday, Dharmesh Shah posted 8 email marketing tips distilled from an interview with Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman in The Boston Globe. I agree wholeheartedly with 7/8ths of her tips, but #7 tripped me up a bit:
7. Two things that get your email opened: #1: “From” and #2 “Subject”.
I actually agree with half of that statement, so let’s call it 14/15ths. Relevant, interesting subject lines are an absolutely critical factor in getting your emails noticed, but “from” fields? I don’t have any primary data to say for sure whether customizing the “from” field in each email is a good idea but my gut says it’s not.
Len Shneyder of email deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity agrees with me in Ken Magill’s Multichannel Merchant article from Saturday (Design with the mangle in mind: E-mail creative tips):
As for the “from” line, Shneyder advises branding the company in it and nothing else because the majority of people decide whether or not to open an e-mail based on who sent it. And no matter how strong the urge to start pitching, the from line isn’t the place to do it, he says.
“Your from line is your calling card,” he says. “Don’t turn it into a door-to-door salesman.”
So who’s right? We’ll have to defer judgement until we see some data. Has anybody run controlled experiments on this?
Tags: Constant Contact, email content, Email Marketing, from field, subject lines
Add Personalized Product Recommendations to Your eCommerce Site
Istobe is a powerful recommendation engine that makes it easy to add recommendations to your eCommerce site. How powerful? Shoppers who click on Istobe recommendations spend 20-50% more than the average visitor.
