What do the Three Amigos have to do with creating the best email campaigns? If you’ve ever seen the film, you’ll surely remember the scene when Dusty Bottoms (Chevy Chase) pretends to be one of El Guapo’s Mexican soldiers. He tries to create stories to convince everyone that he is one of them. After shouting “together we pruned the hedges of many small villages,” El Guapo screams “Who the hell are you?”
Is this the response your email campaigns are receiving? If your email campaigns come From an email sender address that the recipients on your email list do not recognize, than it probably is. Nevertheless, selecting the right sender name is not as simple as it sounds.
Email Sender Name
There are two parts to the Email Sender that appear in the From of an email. These are the Email Sender name and the Email Sender address. Emails sent from ResultsMail, for example, come From “ResultsMail <rminfo@resultsmail.com>”. In this case, ResultsMail is the Email Sender name. This is the name that appears in your inbox when we send you an email. This is the name that should be immediately recognizable.
If you are a real estate agent or a mortgage broker and you want to send out new listings or new rates to your email list, then you may want to send from your own name rather than your agency or your brokerage. In this situation, your name is your brand. Build the trust in your name with your email campaigns and if you later move to a different agency or brokerage, even though your email sender address may change, you get to bring your trusted email sender name with you.
If you are promoting a large business, on the other hand, you would want to send from the name of the company. The company name is the brand to promote and reinforce, not the CEO’s name. While it may seem nice to send a note directly from the CEO, unless you’re Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or Warren Buffett, you’re probably better off sticking with the company name everyone knows. For some, it may not even be the company name that’s recognizable but the name of the product. If that’s your case, use it.
Do you want to make the sender name work a little harder for you? Try adding some marketing language to it. Spirit Airlines sends from “Spirit Deals” as their Sender name.
Email Sender Address
The Email Sender email address is the most important part from a technical perspective. This is the address that the recipient’s email server looks at to determine if the email message is legitimate. It is also the address that the recipient’s email client software looks at to determine if it is a safe message that should appear in the recipient’s inbox. Finally, it is the email address that recipients will reply to when they click reply on the email.
When someone receives an email and opens the message to read it, most email programs will flag that email address as an accepted sender for that user. On some programs the user may have to click a button to accept the sender. Regardless of the mechanism, the key factor here is that once your sender email address has been accepted by a recipient your email message will continue to arrive directly in their inbox every time. If you change your sender email address, your email message may be flagged as an unknown sender and even filtered to a junk mail folder.
It is therefore of the utmost importance to select a good sender email address and then stick with it. Once you start sending from that email address it will begin to acquire a reputation as a known, accepted sender. This is a reputation that you must protect. The success of your email marketing depends on it.
It is also very important that the email sender address you select be a valid, functional email address that you may reply to. This is a requirement of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Some email marketers prefer not to use their personal email address so that it does not get inundated with vacation messages, added to someone’s joke list, or spammed by their viruses. This is ok, so long as the email address is monitored. Some recipients may ignore the automatically included Unsubscribe link in the footer of your ResultsMail email and instead send an email in reply to the sender. If you are not actively monitoring replies to your sender email address you could miss some unsubscribe requests and get yourself into trouble.
Be the Master of your Domain
As mentioned in our previous blog post, Why you can’t send email marketing campaigns from AOL or Yahoo anymore, sending email from an AOL or Hotmail email address from another email server, like ResultsMail’s, that does not belong to AOL or Hotmail, will result in the rejection of that email message. This is due to their implementation of a DMARC policy. This policy may expand to other major ISP’s and so it is recommended to use your own website domain for your sender email address.
If you do not have your own website domain, purchase one. Website domains are very low cost and essential marketing resources for your business. Once you have a Website domain, set up an email address on it and use this as your Sender Email address.
Add a Sender
With ResultsMail, we have made it easier than ever to send to your list from the name that your recipients will recognize. When you log
in to ResultsMail, on the right hand sidebar you will see the links to Manage Senders & Footers as well as Add a Sender. To make your email campaigns even more successful, you may change the CAN-SPAM footer details to include an address that matches the sender. This is a great tool for sending email campaigns on behalf of others or if your company has multiple locations.
The email sender name and email sender address that you use is key to the success of your email campaign. If your recipients don’t see your email address and immediately remember the great exploits you have accomplished together, then there is no reason for them to open your email message. Even if they did sign up at your website and request to receive your newsletter, they may just say “Who the hell are you?” and click on the unsubscribe link or worse, click the This is Spam button filing a complaint with their ISP.