Some of you probably have several email addresses for different aspects of your business and personal lives. But have you ever wondered what those email addresses say about you? And, more importantly, what they say about your subscribers? Are some email clients trending upwards, or does it relate to demographics in some way?
Bottom line… there are several aspects of each email address to consider if you’re an email marketer. First and most obvious is choosing the one for your “From field”.
Sitting next to the subject line, it’s a key factor in whether subscribers decide to open (or not) a message, so a trusted sender address is a must – we can’t stress that enough.
Now, about your other email addresses – have you ever thought of how they’re perceived in general? Does the fact that you’re an AOL, Hotmail, an @domain.com or a Gmailer affect how others perceive you? Could any of these make you appear more established, or hipper, or perhaps “old school”?
And again, what do email addresses say about your subscribers? And how do you separate opinion from fact?
There are certain stereotypes on the one hand, which tend not to be fair at times, and some interesting studies on the other.
But first, some facts:
- IT Managers rely on email addresses when assessing job applications. An aol.com email will most likely be thought of as old-fashioned and ignorant, while a hotmail.com address might be associated with young people.
- Usually, though, the user name is much more important than the domain. An email that looks like: firstname.lastname@yourdomain.com is more likely to look serious and business-like than totallybonkers888@hotmail.com, which was fun back when you used it for communicating with friends online.
- In business, there’s also a very clear distinction between using a free email address compared to a professional-looking domain with the company name. I’m sure you know what I mean when you see emails like: gringobingo133@aol.com vs. firstname.lastname@companyname.com.
But what does this mean for your email marketing?
First of all, an email address with your own domain, whether from your own professional website or that of your company, is a must for respectability and legitimacy in the 21st century business world. After all, how can we expect others to trust in our expertise or services if we don’t even have our own web presence?
But apart from setting up a professional business email address (or addresses for that matter) it might also be a good idea to analyze your subscriber base and give their addresses some consideration when targeting your messages.
Not to leave you hanging and give you a bit of food for thought, we took a closer look at our own database to find out which email address are the most responsive – in terms of opens and click throughs. Here’s what we found out.
We took a look at subscribers who signed up during one month last spring:
- The most popular domain address was Yahoo (over 960k), followed by Gmail (almost 670k), and Hotmail (470k).
- This sequence was retained when it comes to how many of them opened the email, but with much less variation.
- In terms of clicks, Gmail users turned out to be more active, clicking almost twice as often as Yahoo users, who clicked twice as often as Hotmailers.
- Aol came in fourth in all aspects.
See what I mean? This could be useful research in relation to the value of a single email address Mick talked about last time. Now this is getting more interesting, don’t you think! 🙂
Of course, these results might be completely different for your particular business, but we always encourage you to analyze your campaign results to target them as accurately as possible.
We’re curious if you have any thoughts and experiences related to your subscriber list and their email addresses. It would be great if you could share them with us!
