Silverpop has recently conducted a study to see what is really stopping your members or constiuents from opening their emails from you. Is it that catchy subject line that your marketing associate spent days thinking up? NOPE. Is is all the pretty pictures in the email? NOPE. Is it the time of day the email is sent?

NOPE.

The silverpop study, something my friend over at Silas Partners - Jacob Smith - wrote about today and brought to my attention. (well, he actually gave me an offhanded challenge to see who could blog about it first.) (He won) (I let him.)

The study showed that in their case, it wasn’t the subject line length, or offer, or the avoidance of certain no-no words that caused openers to pause before continuing.

It was the sender. The almighty “FROM” that shows up in you inbox in Outlook or whatever email program you use.

Just like in Direct Mail, it is very important to test a ’signer’ of a direct mail piece to see who will get a higher response rate. The same goes for email marketing efforts. You must test who your email comes from. We all know it doesn’t really come from the head of the organization when we get it in our inbox, but we can assume that if it has the CEO or President’s email - he (or she) must have seen this message - therefore you increase the credibility of the piece and increase your open rates.

Stop what you are doing right now and look to see who YOUR organization’s emails come from. I can wait. . . . . . . . .

Now that you are back, does that ‘FROM’ name make any sense to the offer or the program? Are you sending emails from info@blank.org

I have a client that is currently working through this issue, as their emails come from ‘marketing3@…” So our first step in testing a new email program is to test the sender name. Remember their are several places that a name will appear. I can appear as the ‘Name’ and or an ‘email address’ depending on the email client. Maybe your emails are coming from just your organization.

You should sit down and map out all of your email communications to determine who the message should be coming from. It’s ok to have mulitple senders, just as long as you are consistent and their messages are always similar.

So, the next time you have an email going out to your list.

Stop and Think.

Filed under: Agency, Analytics, Email Marketing, Non-Profits on Monday, September 24th, 2007 by Serengeti Communications |
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