Tips: Using a proper From name

Transactional email doesn’t get as much attention from business owners as, say, their weekly newsletter. This isn’t good, and not just because we run Postmark. Transactional mail is your one-to-one communication with your customer, effectively building your relationship, more than any marketing email.

Today I want to talk about the From name. While this may seem easy, “Just make it my apps name”, I’d like to point out some important tidbits. First, do you know that most email clients truncate the From name to 20-30 characters? That means that you should be short and sweet. Just yesterday I received a notification from British Airways, and I almost thought it was Spam. The full From name was: British Airways Customer Services but Gmail showed it to me as: British Airways Customer. Obviously, they should have come up with something a bit more obvious.

Equally important is making sure the your customer knows who the email is coming from (enter your apps name here) and what the email is about (enter transaction type). Here’s what I mean. If you are sending a receipt for a purchase, you should probably make that From name different than the one you use for your newsletters. I also like different From names for sorting purposes. It’s easier for your customer if they can quickly find their invoices instead of sorting through all emails from you.

For example, I’d like to rename the Beanstalk Incident reports. Right now, they just come from Beanstalk. I’d like to change them to Beanstalk Incident. Small change, but I think it would really start to differentiate our communication with our customers.