Email Marketing Advice: That FROM Field Can Really Sting You In The Butt

By Joan Pasay

It sure is a big responsibility to be in charge of the company Email Newsletter. Once a week you, and only you, are responsible to carefully craft an email marketing message and get it out to all of your sacred e-newsletter subscribers.

You take the job seriously and get started early in the week. You want this email message to be really great. The company is counting on you! Your email marketing campaign is one of your employer's core marketing activities.

1. It is Wednesday. You take the afternoon and carefully craft the weekly company email message.

2. It is Thursday. You spell check the weekly company email message.

3. It is Friday. You ask your marketing buddy across the office to proof the weekly company email message. You don�t want to embarrass yourself with grammatical errors or an article that does not make sense!

4. It is Saturday. You sleep on it and are confident the weekly company email message is ready to go.

5. It is Sunday. You take the day off and have a really great afternoon with your boyfriend. You are worry free! Your weekly company email message is all put to bed and ready to go.

6. You wake up early on Monday morning, get to the office and login into your Email List Management service and get your weekly company email message all queued up.

7. You press send and watch your weekly company email message go into cyberspace. �Oh, goody!� you exclaim. �Think of all the business I am going to bring into the company with this carefully crafted email marketing message!�

8. It is Monday, one second later. A subscriber receives the weekly company email message in their inbox.

9. It is Monday, two seconds later. Your subscriber looks at the FROM field.

10. It is Monday, three seconds later. Your subscriber seems perplexed. �Hmmm, who is Mary Franklin?� they think.

11. It is Monday, four seconds later. Your subscriber takes a deep breath, says, �Never heard of her,� and presses the delete button.

12. It is Monday, five seconds later. You are in a meeting with your new boss. You yelp, grab your butt and scream, �I think I just got stung by a bee!�

You did. And you let it out and you painted the target on your hiney.

Your name might mean something to you but your email list subscribers probably have no idea who you are and will freak out when they see a strange email in their inbox from some gal named Mary Franklin.

If you are Anthony Robbins you can get away with it.

Since I assume you:

-have never walked on fire
-are not almost seven feet tall and
-don't have a huge toothy grin

You don�t qualify to put your name in the From field of your weekly company email marketing messages.

Think about it from your subscriber�s point of view.

-They subscribed to an email list from your company.
-They expect to receive a message from your company.

Instead they receive a message from someone named Mary Franklin. Someone they have never heard of, never met, never seen, and is not mentioned in any literature that belongs to the company.

I think the only logical reaction would be to press the delete button. Wouldn�t you do the same thing?

Here are some suggestions for a FROM field that will mean something to your email list subscribers:

-Your company name and URL (Hey, you can put anything you want in here, so the clearer the better).

-The name of your periodic mailing (only if it is well- branded).

-Your company name AND the name of your periodic mailing.

Keep your name to yourself. I hate to bruise your ego, but no one cares if a message comes from you expect people who know you.

Feeling like you have a few swollen, red bumps on your rear?

Go check your FROM Field.

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Copyright Joan Pasay - 2005