Your sender name and email address — also known as your ‘from’ address — helps to identify you to your recipients, so it’s important to choose something professional and easily recognizable to them. Studies on email open rates have found that trusting the sender is the single most important factor in whether an email is opened or not. Because your sender info builds up the trust equation between your subscribers, and both consistency and familiarity are proven to help grow that bond, it’s critical to choose an effective and consistent ‘from’ name and email address.
However, when new accounts are created, the account owner’s name and email address are initially applied as the default setting for this, which means it is best to edit the details of your sender information before sending your first campaign.
Important things to consider when selecting your sender email name and address:
- To give your emails the best chance of reaching the inbox, don’t use a free webmail address. For example, email addresses from Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, Hotmail, or Gmail. Instead, use an email address registered at your organization’s own domain or one that is easily identifiable as your brand. In most situations, it’s much better to use a company or brand name over an individual person’s name, unless that person is the brand, like Madonna or Betty Crocker.
- When an email is sent through a third-party email service provider (ESP) like ours, receiving email servers view free webmail ‘from’ addresses (such as the ones listed above) as more suspicious than those from custom domains, increasing the chance emails from those addresses will be rejected. This is the case no matter which ESP you use. But don’t worry, we’ll warn you if your sender address could cause a delivery issue.
- Be sure to use an actual, existing valid email address to collect replies to your newsletters and make sure it matches your ‘from’ name. Some email providers, like Gmail, actually look into recipient behavior after an email lands in the inbox. If a subscriber responds to your email, it’s more likely to be marked as important. To assist with subscriber trust, the best practice is to match your ‘from’ name to be the same or similar to your ‘from’ email address. For example, if a subscriber receives an email from ABC Widgets Support, they would expect it to be linked with an email address similar to support@abcwidgets.com.
Ways to edit your sender details
It’s common for company mail administrators and individual email users to use the ‘from’ address to identify trusted senders. You should choose sender details that clearly identify you or your organization. Often that will be your company name, or the name of the product people have signed up to learn about. Sender details can be changed in two ways, as explained in the sections below.
Change the default sender details for all emails
If you regularly use the same name and email address for your mailings, you should set these up as the default sender details in your account. Every time you create a new mailing or automation, these will autofill for you.
Three steps to edit your default sender details:
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Log into your account and click your name at the top right corner. From there, select Account from the dropdown menu.
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On the Account page, click Sender info.
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Enter your preferred sender name and sender email address, then click Save.
Change sender details for a single email
When sending a mailing, you can change your sender details on the mailing details page. It can be a one-off change for a specific email, or you can tick the checkboxes below each field to set these details as the new default:
If you have Author or Editor permissions in a multiuser account, the button at the top right of the mailing details page says ‘Review’ not ‘Review & send’. You can edit the sender’s name and email, but to add recipients or set up a split test, you need to click ‘Finish’ and then forward the email to someone in your account who has permission to send it.
Add a reply-to address
The reply-to address refers to the email address that will be used if recipients respond to your mailing. Unless you add a specific email address for this purpose, all replies will be sent to the sender address.
There are two important aspects to remember here. First, you’ll want to ensure that your reply-to email address is based on the same domain as your sender email address, and second, make certain that the address is from a unique domain and not a free webmail address like @gmail.com.
As an example of what NOT to do, let’s say the sender email is @yourcompany.com but the reply-to email is @gmail.com, this can look like a phishing attempt to most mail clients, and any campaigns you send will likely get filtered as SPAM or even be undelivered altogether, which can negatively affect your sender reputation.
To add a different reply-to address, after you have clicked to Review or Review & send on the mailing details page, check the Set a separate reply-to email address checkbox that’s under your sender name and email, then enter your preferred address.
Personalize for the purpose
If you send both marketing and transactional emails, give subscribers an idea of what you’re sending them by fitting the ‘from’ email address to the purpose, like these precursors newsletters@, support@ or billing@. Or, if you’re worried about managing too many email addresses, you can always use a different reply-to address when sending a campaign to redirect replies to fewer mailboxes.
This splitting of function also allows subscribers to manage your emails using their own client filters however they see fit. It also ensures that if they, for example, write a rule that deletes all emails from newsletters@, they will still receive emails from invoices@ or support@.
Don’t use a no-reply address
Sending from a no-reply address comes across as uncaring to subscribers. It can also be frustrating if they need to reach you about something, and it may even be bad news for delivery rates in the long term. The way a user engages with your email — including replying — can help determine where you end up in the inbox.
Using a no-reply email address violates CAN-SPAM laws because your subscribers must be able to opt-out just by replying to the email.
People replying to your emails is a positive engagement indicator that mailbox providers use to determine sender reputation, so it should be encouraged instead of discouraged. Of course, putting an email address out there may attract its fair share of auto-replies and bad responses, but it also opens the door to useful, legitimate conversations with your customers. This is why a functional reply-to address is required because you must be able to view and respond to replies.