E-mail Marketing – When should we use personalized email and/or general email?
We often hear this question on what kind of email addresses should be used in email marketing. Based upon various situations, there are appropriate uses for both – personalized email or general email.
What is a Personalized Email?
Obviously, these email address speak to the audience that the email belongs to an individual person. E.g john.doe@yahoo.com. These emails would most likely end up in a personal mailbox.
What is a Generalized Email?
Generalized emails are simply email addresses that would tend to represent the entire organizations or department. e.g. sales@mountport.com or info@google.com. These emails would tend to go to more than 1 person in the team.
Advantages and Uses of Personalized Email in Mass-Mail
When sending out thousands to emails, sending them from personalized email address play an important role in the Click Through Rate of the campaign. For an example, if you bought your Mercedes from Jill Doe in your town, you are more likely to open the email coming from jill.doe@local-car-shop.com than if the email came from general sounding info@local-car-shop.com.
While it is personalized, only slight disadvantage in this case would be when a recipient replies to the email, the response will go directly to the sales person (who may or may not be the best person to receive that piece of communication at that time), and the marketing team will lose control on the communication.
Sending blast-mail from a personalized email offers warmth of human touch however for marketing perspective it loses control on the consistency of the message delivery.
Advantages and Uses of General Email in Mass-Mail
For similar test cases conducted, email open rate from a general email address such as (sale@company-name.com) has lower open rate than campaigns with personalized email address (jill.doe@company-name.com). However, when responses are received from an email campaign in a generalized setting, all replies would go to marketing department making it convenient to send OFFICIAL and consistent marketing message.
For the inbound emails using forms though, a generalized email has an advantage over personalized emails for following reasons:
- For example, if all emails are going to shelly@company.com then would someone be receiving Shelly’s personal emails while she is in vacation or whenever she is not around.
- Instead of going to Shelly@, if it would be going to Contact@, users would think it is more authentic and someone (from the entire team) will certainly be looking into it.
- General emails in this case would also protect employee’s private email from public view (and aha from spammers.)
- A general email makes a small organization look structured and “big”.
Though, success rate of an email marketing campaign could depend upon a lot of other factors namely subject line, content, graphics, html vs text and so on, which kind of email-address is used in “FROM” also matters. Similarly in an inbound form, a more generic email address looks more authentic building trust with the customer to win his/her business. A right use for each for right purpose will make a winner.
