We all prefer dealing with a person directly rather than a machine. Why should email be any different?
Receiving an email from a person rather than from a faceless email address (which we subconsciously know is very likely to be spam) significantly affects our attitude before we even open it. It also affects our mindset towards the message when we read it.
When running email campaigns for Allanda, I tested using an actual person’s name as the sender (generally my name or Helen@ for consistency) rather than our generic Customer Services email address.
This small change achieved significantly greater open rates.
We saw uplifts of between 29.7 to 51.6% higher depending on the email title.
When combined with a reasonably generic title (e.g. “This is useful information”), we measured open rates between 30.4 -68.6% greater than from the generic Customer Service email address.
We also received the occasionally confused reply. Some recipients confused the Helen@ sender with one of their actual friends, but it is always interesting to know what customers had been up to recently and where they had been on holiday. 😀
A similar study by Voices.com saw an identical small change (hello@ changed to Silvana@) alone improved open rates from 28.75% to 43.63%.
This study hypothesised that the open rate might also be linked to how emails are routed. The view was that emails from a person are more likely to be routed to Gmail’s primary inbox and avoid a Promotions or Junk inbox and that this routing might apply to other email providers too?
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