Yesterday I talked about Reputation and how this is used to determine if your email is going to be successfully delivered to your intended recipient. Additionally here are a few other articles that you should review; Monitoring Your Reputation and The best way to build reputation on new IPs?
I also mentioned that today I’d talk about ‘Recognition’. Getting a subscriber to recognize your mail and it will get opened. Easy enough? Wrong. Many marketers are still failing at this and it causing a number of issues… like opt-outs and spam complaints.
So how do you increase recognition of your messages?
Start by selecting the proper email ‘Alias’ for your messages (left side of @ sign), it should be something that instantly recognizable to a user, something that relates directly to your brand. It also needs to be something that is not going to be easily confused with the average spam message many people receive (avoid generic names like; offers@, support@ and news@). This should also build awareness and heightens recognition with users as they interact with your brand (try Brand@, BrandOffers@ or BrandNews@). This is key for mailings to AOL where only the email address is shown and the display name is hidden in the inbox view.
Consistency should also be a key aspect of your messaging and branding. This way a user can add one from address to their address book and it will safe list (images/links enabled) for all of your publications.
Past studies have shown that upwards of 73% of people surveyed reported spam simply based on the “FROM” address, showing a strong indication that recognition in the email address is key.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about ‘Read-ability’, and how this should be incorporated into your messages.
