In this episode of ‘Do This, Not That’, Jay delves into the power of multi-identities and testing various from names, drawing inspiration from big players like Apple. Don’t miss out on leveraging this overlooked aspect of email marketing to enhance engagement without annoying your recipients. Discover how adding specific offers in the ‘From Name’ section can increase opens by up to 25% and why certain names outperform brand names.
Main Discussion Points:
– The “from name” is what shows up for the recipient, while the email address remains the same. You can customize it on any email platform.
– Including your offer in the from name (e.g. “Acme 20% Off”) boosts open rates 25%+ over just having your brand name.
– “Person from Brand” (e.g. “Jen from Acme”) improves open rates 20% over just the brand name.
– Testing different from names allows you to send more emails without seeming repetitive.
– Apple sends 5-6 emails in a day by using different from names for each product/service.
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Transcript
Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.
You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. Okay, we are here.
Or do this, not that. And this might be the.
The most important episode I've done of this show because I want to go over something that I think can have probably a bigger impact in your email marketing efforts than anything else I've talked about. I know I'm gonna lose some of you, but you gotta stick with me because I want to share the details.
We're gonna talk about the From Name that you're emailing from, because as we go through this, there are gonna be some tactics here that if you try, it can completely change the level of engagement that you have, and it'll also change the amount of email that you can send. All right, so first off, when I want to just talk about what From Name actually means. When you send out an email.
When I send you an email from me to you, my email address is the letter j shwettlesonorpwd.com Ooh, ugly. It's an email address, but when you get in your inbox, it shows up as my name, J. Schweddelson. Why? Because, like, we all do. What do we do?
We set a From name on our email address, and we do that from our brands as well. Right. When you get an email from Nike, the email address that you don't really look at is like offer@nike.com. right?
But the from name that shows up that you see is all nice and pretty just says Nike now on any platform, I don't care what platform you use. I don't care. Sophisticated, expensive, horrible, good in between, doesn't matter.
However you send out your email, you can change the from name every time you send out a campaign. When I say you could change the from name, we are not changing your address that you're sending out from.
This has nothing to do with the email address that you're sending out from. It has to do with what is going to show up in that person's inbox. Okay? Sometimes you call the From Name the friendly from.
Sometimes they call it the alias of the email address. It's whatever you want it to say.
You could literally have your emails come from Howdy Doody, and then the Next time, you could have it come from Ronald McDonald, okay? You can change it to whatever you want it to say. Why does this matter? Here's why it matters.
Let's say on the consumer side, you're sending out an email and you're trying to promote 20% off.
And when you send that out and your brand is called Socks Mania, when you send out that email right now, what you're doing is you're sending out the email and all you're using that from name, it just says Socks Mania. What you want to do, though, is you want to incorporate the offer in the from name. You can literally say socks mania 20% off in the from name.
You can have it say Socks Mania biggest sale. Okay? You could have it say Socks Mania exclusive. You can have it say whatever you want on the business side.
Instead of it have it having it come from, you know, Cloud Solutions. If that's the name of your company, it can come from Cloud Solutions events Cloud Solutions, FYI, Cloud Solutions tips guide.
You can talk about whatever it is that you're promoting as your offer in the from name.
Now, when you do that, when your from name includes the offer that you're promoting versus doing a regular From Name, which is just your brand, when you have it include the offer that you are promoting, it increases open rate, the percentage of people opening up your emails by over 25%. And all you're really doing is taking the offer that you're probably promoting in the subject line, right?
Your webinar, your guide, your 20% off, your, your free shipping, whatever it is, and you're sticking that critical one or two words and, and you're putting it in the from name along with your brand. That's all you're doing.
And essentially what's really going on, if you really want to boil it all down, you're treating the from name almost like the start of your subject line because it's the first thing that we're all looking at.
So the first thing that you want to test, and it's always about testing, is instead of just sending the from name being your brand, it's from name +offer, whatever your offer is, I don't care. This also works really well with your newsletters. When you send out your newsletter, you don't want it to just come from your brand. It's wallpaper.
It could be, you know, Acme, FYI, Acme must read, right? Something that grabs that attention a little more exciting from name in many cases. I love this quote by Anne Hanley from marketing Profs.
I'm a big fan of everything she does and she tweeted out that the from name to her is more important than the subject line in terms of generating interest. That's crazy. How else can you use that from name? Let's talk about it coming from a human. Okay, I'll tell you something that works so well.
Put aside it coming from a salesperson or just a person's name, that does really well. That's a whole other topic.
Okay, Instead of it coming from your brand, you know the Acme company, what you want to test is literally have it come from Jen from Acme. When I say Jen from Acme, I'm literally saying have it say the word gen and then write F R O M Acme. That is your from name.
Your email address is still whatever it normally comes from person. Literally the word from person from brand versus just having it come from the brand has over a 20% increase in overall open rate. Person from brand.
So you need to kind of rethink.
When you're setting up your email campaigns, every time you hit send you say, wait a minute, I don't need to just consider what is the subject line going to say for this thing? The creative writing contest starts with that From Name. Now here is the other massive win home run win when it comes to the From Name. You ready?
Let's think about Apple for a second. How many emails in one day do you get from Apple? Do you even know? I bet you don't. Apple is the king of from names.
Changing from names, what do they do?
In a given day, you'll get an email from the App Store as one From Name from Apple, one as another name from Apple Fitness, from Apple TV from the Apple Store. You might get five to six emails from Apple in one day. And you don't realize it because they're always using a different from name.
It's still coming from the same address. They only have one email address with you. Do you get annoyed? You get angry? No, because in your mind it's a different thing.
It's all subconscious, like, oh, this is not just Apple being annoying. It's coming from different things. Now all these different brands do this and you don't realize it. What does that matter to you?
It's because if you use the from name properly, it gives you the ability to send out more email to your database without driving them bananas. Okay, you can have one email come from, you know, Jen from brand.
You can have another one come from, you know, brand events, another one come from, you know, Brand. FYI, you can have one come from the desk of the CEO, right?
The from name allows you to send out more email because the recipient does not feel like it's all coming from that same brand that given day.
So what you want to be testing is not just which from names do really well, but incorporating multiple identities of yourself via that from name and then increasing your sending rate. Always have to be relevant.
You have to always make sure you're saying relevant stuff, but increase your sending frequency and seeing do your response rates hold, is your performance hold, does your engagement hold? Maybe even goes up.
But if you're not spending an inordinate amount of time testing the from name, the friendly from the alias, you are making a mistake. Like I said, this is not like, oh, I don't have the right platform. I can't do it. That's garbage. That's not true. This works on any platform.
It costs you no money. It takes five seconds. And it's not like you have to get your IT guy involved. You do not. It could not be easier.
It could not be an easier thing to test. All right, so from name for the win.
Now, before we get on to the last segment of this thing, because you know, we have the segment called since you didn't ask, which is totally bananas. Before we get on to that, I'm really excited to share that. Now do this not that is exclusively presented by, by Marigold.
Why am I so fired up to share that? Because I have been a customer of Marigold for a really long time.
I use Marigold to send out the emails for my company and we send out billions of emails. And this platform is amazing. And as we have grown, okay, Marigold has allowed us to grow with them.
They're fantastic email sending platform, loyalty marketing platform, a relationship marketing platform. And they are in every industry. They're in American Airlines as a client, Notre Dame University, honey bake ham. Every industry.
If you're not familiar with Marigold, check them out@meet marigold.com. that is meet marigold.com strongly recommend that.
All right, now let's get on to the last segment of this thing called, since you didn't ask, this is where I talk about nonsense. Things have nothing to do with work or whatever, just whatever's going on in my life. Oh, why am I about to talk about this? I don't know.
But this is what I do, okay? I try, I fail. But I try to be healthy, relatively healthy, okay? And I try to eat right.
I, I, I mean, it doesn't always go well, and I try to work out. I miss a bunch of times. But on the weekends, I always. Saturday and Sunday, I always go for a run. Yes, I do.
I'm not trying to be one of these people, like, oh, go for a run. Be healthy. Do what you want to do. I'm just telling you what I do and what bothers me.
So I live in this neighborhood where there is a three mile circle in the neighborhood around this lake thing. So every Saturday and Sunday, I run in my neighborhood for three miles. And the thing that is driving me crazy is I am not good at running.
I run very, very slow because I'm not one of these people that just can, like, run and feel good about things. It's, like, impossible for me. It's like, if you saw me running, you, you'd be like, oh, my God, something's wrong with him.
And I'm also not one of those guys wearing, like, short shorts that looks like a total, I don't know, strange situation going on. Like, way too into it with armbands and stuff. No, that's not me. I look, like, about to fall over.
But the problem is, every time I finish running, okay, I get. I make it back home.
Later on in the day, I'll be out in my neighborhood, and I'll see somebody in my neighborhood, and they'll say, hey, Jay, I saw you today out. I'm like, cool, yeah. How was your walk? And I'm like, what are you talking about? I go, you were walking? I go, no, I was running.
And they go, know you were walking. Because I run so slow that I get made fun of for running slow. I run so slow. And every, literally every weekend, someone's like, I saw you walking.
I'm like, no, I was running, dude. Okay? And then this past, which is why it's on my mind. This past weekend, I'm running. Don't even tell me I'm walking, okay?
And this dude pulls up in his car, rolls down his window, and he goes, jay, Jay, I want to talk to you. Right? And so I take off my headphones. I'm like, yo, what's up? He goes, how's your walk going? And then he drove away laughing. Oh, my God. I wanted to.
I wanted to just take this. Dude, I was so angry. Like, what is wrong? Like, everyone just needs to stay. Stay in their lane, okay? So if you see me out running, I am running.
I'm not walking. Don't even get me started. Literally. I sound angry. I sound angry. It's weird. I sound angry. It's true.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this podcast and check out. I don't even know what you should check out, but check it out and give this thing a five star review. Because hey, why not? We're here.
Let's have some fun. Great. Thank you. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
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