Does the sender on your email outreach really make a difference? You might be surprised. Name recognition can be important for both sides of your sales funnel, whether it’s the leads you’ve started to engage or the repeat customers on your marketing lists. And the person associated with that material could mean the difference between recipients who ignore those messages, and those who open them.
Why leads are interested
Once leads have received enough emails to recognize a sender’s name, they’ll be able to associate it with a company, product, service, and (more or less) the reason for your outreach. That can be good in some ways: for one, they’ve accepted that you’re a real business that’s actively interested in a partnership with them, rather than a potential spammer. But it can also result in lower open rates in times when those leads need to skim through their inboxes and only focus on the most pertinent information. If they know what need you fill, and they don’t have that need, your email could end up on the backburner for review later, or simply forgotten.
That may not necessarily be a cause for concern, because leads should continue to receive more emails from you at a pretty established frequency — but it could also run the risk that when they’re ready to do business, your name isn’t top of mind. That’s why it may be time to switch up the sender on your emails to encourage leads to see who they are. They may still pass on responding once they recognize this new person is also part of your company, but at least you get more facetime. That alone can reinforce your prospecting and improve the chances of being remembered when it counts.
Why customers are interested
You may appreciate the familiarity that name recognition carries when your customers have established relationships with your team, from account managers and marketing coordinators to billing specialists and presidents. MarketingProfs notes that roughly 68 percent of Americans already choose to open an email based on the name of the sender. When they also know the sender’s function at your company, they’ll have an idea what it is that they’re being emailed about (besides, of course, from the subject line). This means they’ll be more likely to open and respond.
But when you’re starting to see a downtick in the number of responses one of your team members is getting, it can help to change up the sender to see if that encourages your customers to open — not simply because they may think the message will be about something else, but because certain name recognition may prompt them to prioritize that message over others. So, when there’s information your customer has been slow on relaying to you, or there’s an outstanding service that needs to be addressed, see if having another name is what prompts your customers to finally connect.
How many should you use?
If you do decide to test out different senders, you don’t need to go too crazy. Two or three total would be fine, which you can then alternate depending on the nature of the message. You may find that one has a better pull than others, whether in terms of open and click rates, or for direct responses. The language you use may also be important based on who the sender is and whether they’re writing to a lead or a customer.
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