Your Company Name Has Changed - Treat Your From Label Carefully!

We spend a bunch of time talking about the art of the Subject Line here at VR. Why? It’s critical to get it right so you maximize your response from your email marketing campaigns. But what about the From Label? How important is it?

We think it’s arguably the 1st or 2nd most important part of your email campaign. Why?
It’s whom you originally made your relationship with when your recipient signed up for your email. They’ll recognize whom the email is coming from and a good percentage of them will hopefully open your email and click on your links.

Changing your From Label could increase your unsubscribe rates if your recipient does not recognize the From, not to mention your recipients could feel “tricked” into opening your email, then complain to you or your ISP for potential spamming. No one wants that.

So What Happens When You Change Your Company Name??

This happens all the time with mergers, acquisitions and general company name changes. How do you treat this? One word: Carefully!

Here’s an approach we took at a previous company for and it worked well.

Send a first email campaign with the old company name announcing the new company name in the subject line.

Send your next month or two of email campaigns “From Old Company Name/New Company Name”.

The next month or two send your email campaigns “From New Company Name/Old Company Name”.

Finally switch over to “From New Company Name”

This way it’s a gradual change and you’re getting your recipients over time to recognize the company they initially had the relationship with as the new company. This is especially true because your recipients probably don’t always open your email every time you send one (kudos to you if they do!)

If anyone has any other ideas for this situation please chime in.

Comments

[Ryan Ceurvorst]

We recently changed our name in 2007, following a merge of two companies. We used to be Environmental Home Center and Environmental Bulding Supplies. We have since been using all three names in our from line (see below). We haven't seen much of an increase in unsubscribe rates.

From: ecohaus, formerly EHC + EBS