How & Why You Need to be Added to Your Recipient's Address Book

United did something great, for once. Just kidding. But seriously, they sent out a clever email marketing campaign. Simply put, it was an email asking the recipients to add United's From Address to their address books. Why? Because if they do add you, your recipients will not only get your email in their inboxes (avoiding the junk folder), but all of your images will appear and not be stripped out of your email. Some might say "Well Janine, if the email IS going into the junk folder then how would my recipients know"?

Great point. The point is that for all of your recipients that periodically check their junk folders, they might see this and wonder why they have not been getting your emails, and take actions to make sure they do.

How can you help? Just send an email to your recipients with some simple instructions that make it easy for them to add you into their address books.  Here's how to do it using VerticalResponse:

First you need to know what email address to send and the one you'll want to give them is the "From Address" for your VerticalResponse email campaign. The From Address is automatically constructed for you based on the text you put into the "From Label" of your email campaign. The text you enter will be added to the left of the @ sign and to the right will be the VerticalResponse sending domain: "mail.vresp.com."

So let's stop here and give an example.  Let's say I'm creating a new email and my company name is Widgets, Inc.  Well I simply enter my company name into the From Label for the campaign like normal. Now when I send a test email or live email the From Address will be Widgets_Inc@mail.vresp.com. Notice characters such as commas are removed since they cannot be included in a valid email address.

Since the From Address is what you want to get added in your recipient's address book and since the From Address is tied to the text you use for your From Label, we recommend using a consistent From Label for all the campaigns you send.

Here is the email, cheers.

Comments

[Adrian Bye]

I'll echo another poster's comment about how many people actually added united to their addressbook.

Did they test if open rates increased significantly following this email, indicating increased deliverability?

I bet there was no difference.

[Romina]

We have found that sending emails from a certain name "Jeff Moyers" instead of from the company name increases the open rate. we include the company name in the subject. We also use differnt names depending on the audience. what would we do in this case if we wanted to send from different names. Also, what if the IP address is getting blocked anyway?

[RC Rhodes]

You could have links to the top email client programs, i.e. Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc

The links could use Javascript to add your email address to their address book and do a little 1 byte graphic download i.e. web bug - to track how many people clicked the link. That would give you a trackable metric.

[Derek]

And what percentage of recipients actually added United to their address book?

Everyone encourages this address book addition but I've never seen any figures on how many people will actually do it.

I suspect it may be a huge waste of time but have seen no figures either way.

[Chris Street]

nice idea. Could be better implemented by having links to email contact list updating in alternative popular mail managers eg Outlook / Outlook Express etc.

[Michael Zorich]

Thank you for the timely article. We are going to start month-long campaign using Vertical Response system promoting major community event and it gave us a good starting point.

[David Wilding]

I would like to know more about the "detailed instructions." There are so many email clients out there that it is hard to cover them all.

[Jim H.]

Another great tip! People get so much junk email there is danger of them missing something if it does not end up in their inbox. This sounds like a good way to avoid being forever lost in the junk mailbox.

[Email Marketing]

If you already have multiple addresses stored simply click the "Ship to multiple addresses" link. http://www.prevision.co.za/