Your email from name or sender name is like the logo on your storefront. You’d never lightly change your brand name. You want to be instantly recognizable, whether it’s from the curb or in the inbox. You also want to fully leverage all the investments you’ve made in your brand—which your brand name and logo represent—via advertising, marketing, store environments, and customer experiences.

While you’d surely hesitate to change your brand name, most companies wouldn’t hesitate to hang signs in their windows or big banners on their store facade to communicate what’s happening in their store right now. This is essentially the opportunity that brands have with email from name extensions.

This opportunity exists because most brands’ names don’t take up all of the characters available to them in the friendly from field in the inbox. For example, Gmail displays approximately 20 characters of the from name, and the iPhone’s native email client displays 20-25 characters of a from name, depending on the day of the week that the email was delivered and when the recipient reads the envelope content. So if your brand name is, say, 10 characters long, then you have a solid 10 characters left that you can use to say something else to enhance your message.

Taking advantage of this opportunity can increase your unique open rates by 1.3%, according to Oracle Digital Experience Agency research that compared the performance of campaigns that used from name extensions and those that didn’t. Only 40% of brands use from name extensions for any of their email campaigns, so many organizations are missing out on this relatively easy-to-execute tactic.

If you’re unsure of how to use those extra characters, we have some suggestions based on what we’ve seen brands do and what we’ve done with our clients.

From Name Extension Strategies

Here’s a list of approaches to consider—along with potential dividers to place between your brand’s name and the extension:

Seasonal Occasions

Retailers and other brands that are heavily driven by seasonality may want to consider extending their from name with a seasonal tag. Over the past 5 years, this has become the leading use of sender name extensions among B2C brands, with the holiday season being the most popular time to use this tactic. Examples include:

  • YourBrand | Back to School
  • YourBrand Black Friday
  • YourBrand – Cyber Monday
  • YourBrand Cyber Days
  • YourBrand Holiday

Explore holiday email subject line insights to boost your campaign results

Humanization

Consider using your remaining sender name characters to bring in a human voice. In cases where the email is written as being from a particular person, consider using the name of that company executive, customer service representative, salesperson, spokesperson, guest, or partner in the from name. Examples include:

  • YourBrand, Executive’sName
  • YourBrand | Spokesperson’sName
  • YourBrand – Salesperson
  • FirstName from YourBrand

When brands make the risky move of dropping their brand name from their sender name, it’s usually to replace it with a person’s name. This is not uncommon among B2B brands, in particular, which will use the name of a sales representative. B2C brands will sometimes drop their brand name so they can use their CEO’s name. The mistake is thinking those names have as much consumer awareness and power as their brand name. They rarely do. The solution is to use both the company name and the name of the person.

We recommend leading with your brand name and then following with the person’s name. If you’re compelled to do the reverse, be extra wary of leading with a person’s name that’s so long that your brand name will be truncated. That will diminish your brand recognition in the inbox and could lead to a decrease in engagement and an increase in spam complaints and lost subscribers.

How to decide on the right sender name: Brand or person?

Email Content or Promotion

For recurring emails on a topic or theme, consider adding the appropriate descriptor after your brand name. For example:

  • YourBrand Sale
  • YourBrand 1-Day Sale
  • YourBrand Flash Sale  
  • YourBrand VIP Sale  
  • YourBrand Clearance
  • YourBrand Friends & Family
  • YourBrand | New Arrivals
  • YourBrand *Alert*
  • YourBrand News
  • YourBrand Breaking News
  • YourBrand Recommendations
  • YourBrand Webinar
  • YourBrand NewsletterName

Of course, the potential for variety here is vast, depending on your organization and the kinds of campaigns you send. Whatever you choose, be consistent in your usage.

Department

Whether it’s an operational department or a product department, adding a department identifier to your sender name can help customers and subscribers more easily differentiate and prioritize your various emails. This is especially true when the emails are part of a separate opt-in or interaction. Some examples here include:

  • YourBrand LoyaltyProgramName
  • YourBrand Rewards
  • YourBrand Home/Beauty/Outlet/Apparel/Kids/Pharmacy/etc.
  • YourBrand Support
  • YourBrand Service
  • YourBrand Delivery
  • YourBrand Events
  • YourBrand Foundation

Be careful with tags like “Customer Service,” “Customer Care,” and “Guest Rewards,” which can be overly long for brands that don’t have really short names. Look for one-word equivalents whenever possible to avoid or minimize truncations of your email from name.

Automated Emails

Triggered emails are highly relevant and high-value, so consider helping them stand out in the inbox by hinting at their special, contextual nature. Here are some sender name extensions to consider:

  • Receipt email: YourBrand Receipt/Receipts/Order/Reservations
  • Shipping notification email: YourBrand Notification, YourBrand Shipping Notif.
  • Product review request email: YourBrand Reviews
  • Customer service feedback request email: YourBrand Guest Survey
  • Registration confirmation email: YourBrand Registration, YourBrand Events Registration
  • Shopping cart abandonment email: YourBrand – Cart Reminder, YourBrand – Your Cart
  • Browse abandonment email: YourBrand Product Assistance, YourBrand Product Help

This tactic can be highly effective for B2C brands that send a lot of promotional emails. For instance, one of our retail clients altered their from name for some of their automated emails and saw open rates increase 15% and click rates jump 61% compared to a control group.

How many of these more than 110 Automated Campaign Ideas are you using?

The remaining three use-cases are the least used, but may be a good fit for your organization.

Brand Amplification

For those rare organizations that have both a short name and a short slogan, consider including them both in your from name, like this:

  • YourBrand – YourSlogan

Intermediaries

If you’re an intermediary service brand that connects your customers with your partners—think OpenTable and Airbnb—consider making that relationship clear in the sender name by including both brands. For example:

  • YourBrand | PartnerBrand

Sister Brands

If you’re periodically exposing one of your brand’s subscribers to the products and services of one of your other brands, you may want to clarify that relationship in the sender name. For example:

  • YourBrand | SisterBrand

From Name Extension Considerations

As you consider various approaches and possibilities, here are some additional issues to consider:

Your from name is already long. If your brand name has 15 or more characters, it may not make sense to explore from name extensions. You may simply not have enough characters left to be able to use them effectively in the inboxes of enough of your subscribers. If you use “Ltd.,” “LLC,” “Corp.,” and other designators in your from name, consider dropping them to free up characters.

We’ve also seen brands make other compromises to shorten up their brand. For example, Duluth Trading Company often just uses Duluth Trading as their sender name and have gone down to just Duluth to make room for from name extensions, such as Duluth | Clearance. Just be careful that you don’t diminish your brand recognition when making such compromises. Sender recognition is still paramount.

Test it! Even if you have a nice, short brand name, you’ll want to test whether various from name extensions are winners with your subscribers. Be sure to set up your A/B testing correctly.

Set up BIMI. Adding additional words to your sender name has the potential to dilute your brand name. Ensure that your branding is as strong as possible by making use of Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), which enables your logo to appear next to your email from name in many inboxes. BIMI boosts your branding and recognition, which in turn can increase engagement and therefore deliverability.

Don’t overdo it. Just as with any other tactic, there can be diminishing returns if your audience sees it too much. Our research shows that among the brands that use from name extensions, they use them on only 34% of their campaign volume.

While it may make sense for you to differentiate all of your messages using this tactic, you’ll likely find like our clients have that selective use has the biggest impact.

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Need help with your email marketing strategy? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 82.

For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.

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Now updated, this blog post was originally published on Nov. 5, 2019 by Chad S. White, with contributions by Clint Kaiser, Otilia Antipa, and Peter Briggs.