When creating and executing cold email marketing campaigns, it’s critical that they are well planned, thought through and thoroughly A/B tested. Subject lines must be catchy and pitches succinct and to the point. While the content of your email is of immense importance, what we often don’t realise is that the first word your intended recipient reads can either make or break your pitch.

And no, when we say the first word, we don’t mean the subject line, we mean ‘from’ lines.

Subject lines undeniably form part of the recipient’s first impression, however ‘from’ lines are also entangled with your first impressions and are arguably just as important.

In the age of B2B lead generation communication, a more personalized ‘from’ line can help provide a more credible tune to your email. ‘From’ lines represent the serious nature of the email and when sent from a specific person rather than a company, it’ll reflect a sense of personalisation.

In our experience, of testing this rigorously, the ideal combination for the from line is a person’s name coupled with the company name or product name – this can significantly bolster your first impression and can increase your open rates by as much as +10%.

Eg- info@amazon.com – This demonstrates the mass nature of the cold email

Whereas, Tom from Amazon – This provides a sense of personification, giving the sender more credibility along with adding a more serious tone to your email.

And ‘Amazon Support’ – This ‘from’ line lets clients or customers know that the email is important and thus needs to be opened in comparison to the ‘from’ line containing only an email address.   Another modification could be where specific campaigns can have a different ‘from’ line to help garner a better response.

So the big question how do you change your “From Line”?

Well, it’s a slightly different procedure depending on what email service you use, we’ve gone ahead and put the simple instructions below for Gmail user:

Another point to keep in mind is that ‘From’ lines are most prominent in mobile inboxes and with almost 50% of emails being opened on mobile phones, and tailoring your ‘From’ line to meet this demographic could greatly help to step up your cold email performance rates.

There will always be the question of whether you’re using the right ‘from’ line and it is always good to A/B test out different formats. However, one must be careful when experimenting with different ‘from’ lines so as to avoid disrupting relationships with your clients. Constantly changing your ‘from’ line could result in confusion among new and existing clients. It is imperative to be careful when experimenting to avoid having your emails end up in spam. But as long as it isn’t too far out of the box, you’ll be just fine in your attempts to find the champion ‘From Line’.

‘From’ lines may initially seem insignificant in comparison to other aspects of your email, but finding the right one can help you reach your cold email potential. If your still not convinced just consider if you were to receive the below cold emails from me, ask yourself which you would be most likely to open, and which you would most likely ignore… Then consider what a difference the champion “From Line” would witness in terms of open rates, when used at scale!