What can you do to make sure your webinar communications have the best chance of breaking through email overload and clutter these days?
You work on crafting pithy, concise, and informative subject lines. You’re careful about writing persuasive body text. But there may be another overlooked factor that is dragging down the effectiveness of your webinar emails. Let’s talk about the “FROM” field.
When someone fires up their email app and finds a hundred new unread messages, their eye scans the list looking for familiar landmarks. That’s why all your webinar emails should ideally come from the same name.
There are four primary categories of webinar emails (although each category may have more than one instance):
- Invitation
- Confirmation
- Reminder
- Follow Up
If all the emails associated with these categories come from the same sender, it makes it easier for recipients to mentally connect them as part of a single cohesive communication chain about the same subject. This increases the chance that they will be spotted in the overflowing inbox and opened.
Unfortunately, practice is not always as easy as theory. Invitations may be sent from a house mailing system or a third-party bulk mailer that has a hard-coded sender name associated with it. In smaller companies, invitations may go out under the name of someone working in the marketing department. I can tell you that when I see an unexpected email coming from an unfamiliar “Dave” or “Julie” it tends not to get a lot of attention.
Registration confirmation and reminder emails are most commonly sent automatically via your webinar software. Different products deal with the sender name in a variety of ways. My favorites are products that give you complete control over the displayed sender name. But look at GoToWebinar and Zoom – two of the most popular lower priced webinar platforms on the market. Confirmation and reminder emails sent through those systems come from whatever name is associated with the master account. This may be an employee in accounting, or someone in a central IT department, or a generic name that was chosen arbitrarily. Sender names cannot be customized on a per-webinar basis.
The final category is follow up emails sent to attendees and registered no-shows. These may come from an individual working on the webinar (an admin or one of the presenters), they may be set up in the webinar software and come from the account holder, or they may come from a central marketing group using CRM or bulk mailing software.
If you can figure out a way to achieve consistency in the displayed source for all emails associated with your webinar, you boost the chances that your recipients will notice the emails and recognize that they relate to a webinar they are interested in. It’s worth the effort to get a little extra psychological advantage wherever you can.
