Your sender's name is the first point of contact with recipients. It has tremendous bearing on their decision to open or disregard your emails.
In this blog post, we’ll share essential email sender name best practices for cultivating trust, increasing open rates, and bolstering engagement. Each practice is designed to take your sender name strategy up a notch. If you’re ready to optimize your email marketing efforts, let’s get into it!
Email sender name format and why it’s important
The email sender name is displayed in your recipients' inboxes. It’s the first impression you cast upon your audience, so it plays a vital role in deciding whether or not your email gets opened. It’s important to distinguish it from the sender’s email address.
As you can see, there’s no set format for this, and it varies greatly depending on the sender's preferences. Some marketers decide to keep the sender’s name synonymous with the company name, some use their real names, and some use a mix of the two.
You can see the sender’s email address by hovering over the message in your inbox or clicking on it to open it. It appears after the sender’s name between angular brackets, following the typical 'name@domain.com’ format.
Follow these email sender name best practices
If you’re in email marketing and you’ve just decided to take your sender’s name seriously, stick by these best practices so that it hits the mark.
Pick something simple and recognizable
Your audience has a short attention span. If it takes them even a fraction of a second more to read your name, they most likely won’t read it. If they don’t read your name, they won’t remember it.
Accept and honor this fact, and choose a simple and recognizable sender’s name. However, what if your name or surname is complicated or hard to pronounce? Shorten it, drop the long surname, or use your initials. Just take your pick.
Choose a name that recipients can easily identify and associate with your brand or organization. This will generate familiarity and help your open rates.
Keep your sender name consistent
Consistency is important not just across platforms but also across multiple campaigns. That means you shouldn’t use different names on different platforms or change the sender’s name from one campaign to another.
Consistency builds brand recognition and instills trust among your audience. Ensure your sender name remains the same in every email campaign to avoid confusion and establish a strong brand presence in your audience’s psyche.
Include a full name and/or job title
What if you’re not engaging in email marketing to a mass audience but conducting strategic outreach? How should you choose your sender’s name?
In such a scenario, an easy and safe way to choose a sender’s name is to simply opt for your full name. Depending on your audience, you can also add your job title to amp up the effect.
Using a sender's full name or job title provides transparency and authenticity, giving the recipient insight into who is reaching out to them.
This practice also humanizes your emails, making them more trustworthy. Trust is the first step to engagement and cultivating positive relationships with your audience. That’s the ultimate goal of outreach, isn’t it?
Don’t use a “no-reply” sender name
No matter what you do, don’t have a ‘no-reply’ sender’s name, as it discourages communication. Our goal is to encourage recipients to engage with your emails by enticing them to respond and interact.
A no-reply nips that in the bud. A no-reply clearly spells out a one-way autogenerated communication, mainly in the form of notifications, that most recipients tend to ignore.
Opt for a genuine sender name that invites dialogue and feedback to promote a sense of openness and accessibility.
Test out different sender names
Sometimes, choosing a sender name can be challenging since you want to ensure you select one with maximum impact. In such a case, it’s best to experiment with different names and optimize.
Test different combinations of names, company names, or personalized sender names to find out what elicits the most positive response from recipients. Every time you test a new combination, observe how the most essential email marketing metrics change.
However, testing the sender’s name should be done with the ultimate goal of settling on one for the long haul. This is why testing with the sender’s name is best performed in the early stages of branding.
How to change Gmail sender name
Gmail allows its users to change their sender’s name easily. However, you can only do this by accessing the settings from a desktop, not the Gmail app. Learn how to change your Gmail sender’s name easily.
Want to personalize your email sender name? YAMM can help
Changing the sender’s name is good and effective, but do you know what you can do to really have an impact? Personalize your email sender’s name for your audience.
YAMM is an add-on to Gmail that allows you to send personalized email campaigns from Gmail easily. With YAMM, you can change your sender’s name for a particular campaign or even personalize how you sign off for each audience.
In fact, YAMM gives you everything you need to carry out successful email marketing campaigns right from Gmail. Don’t believe us? Explore YAMM for yourself!