your email sucks - again with the "odd" from address

if you've been following my blog, you saw a few weeks back that i posted an email from disney that had a really odd from address. it would seem as though they are still having issues over there.

just a few days ago, i got another email from them, that has an even odder from address:

sending your email from unfamiliar email address can affect the

success of your campaigns.

dimg.dl-dol.exacttarget1@disney.com

i'm currently use exacttarget and i've had issues with it, but i've never seen anything like this before from my sends. it only makes me wonder even more what is going on with disney's account and their sends. (good news is though, i have gotten follow up emails in the series from them, and they are coming through fine.)

but all of that aside, what kinds of negative impacts can these odd from addresses have on their campaigns? i would have to suspect that open rates for these emails are lower than the rest of the emails and that there was probably a slight impact to their sender reputation.

just this week, ken magill (who has interviewed me) over at the magill report, quoted an experian study that showed that personalized email sees a 29% uplift in open rates. his report didn't talk about personalized from addresses though, but i have to think that the use of a cute or personalized email address not only promotes a "face of the company" but a two-way marketing stream and has to provide better open rates. i know i fall prey to this strategy sometimes, especially during this past election season when michelle obama was sending me emails...part of me thought maybe she is sending me an email, maybe this is the one - d*mnit, it's just another request to donate. but using her name got me to open the email.

when i measure the success of an email campaign, i look at it from a few different perspectives - open rate, click thru, and did they do what i wanted them to do? we all know that open rates are dictated by (1) being able to get into the inbox and (2) subject line. but part of getting into the inbox is setting up your dkim, sender profiles, and from addresses properly. because if you can't get into the inbox first and foremost, no one is going to open your email. so think about your from addresses when it comes time to hit send and how those could be impacting the success of your campaigns. nothing says "welcome to our emails" like "do-not-reply@company.com".