Most people’s in-boxes are not short of emails, so it’s important for your email to be noticed and stand out to improve your open rate.

The ‘from name’ is the part of the email address that is shown alongside the email address (or instead of it) in most but not all email clients such as Outlook or Google Mail.

In the example below, the email address Halfords uses is ‘offers@email.halfords.co.uk’. The friendly ‘from name’ they chose to use was ‘Halfords’, which is clearly a nationally recognised and respected brand name.

Halfords-from-address-example

It might be appropriate for a brand or compamy to use a number of from addresses. e.g. A company like Comet may choose to use either ‘Comet Offers’ or ‘Comet Repairs’ to help differentiate between different email content types.

It may be appropriate to use an individual’s name instead of the company name or brand name. e.g. If a company has account managers it may prefer to use the account managers name e.g. John Smith as the from name. Alternatively, John Smith-Comet would be a ‘belt and braces’ approach. The risk of using an individuals name is that if they were to leave or change jobs, you would have to change the from name and potentially compromise the email open rate with a new from name.

Keep testing

With Brand New Way’s Professional Plus email system, you can automatically carry out split testing to find out which from addresses deliver the best email performance.

Key learning

  • using an appropriate from address can help your emails stand out in a crowded in-box
  • using more than one from address can help the recipient differentiate between different email content types e.g. sales & service
  • if the relationship is more ‘people’ based e.g. with named ‘Customer Account Managers’ then consider using the individual’s name
  • keep testing to find out what works best