Your email from name or sender name is like the logo on your storefront. You’d never lightly change your brand name. You want to be instantly recognizable, whether it’s from the curb or in the inbox. You also want to fully leverage all the investments you’ve made in your brand—which your brand name and logo represent—via advertising, marketing, store environments, and customer experiences.

While you’d surely hesitate to change your brand name, most companies wouldn’t hesitate to hang signs in their windows or big banners on their store facade to communicate what’s happening in their store right now. This is essentially the opportunity that brands have with email from name extensions.

This opportunity exists because most brands’ names don’t take up all of the characters available to them in the friendly from field in the inbox. For example, Gmail displays approximately 20 characters of the from name, and the iPhone’s native email client displays 20-25 characters of a from name, depending on the day of the week that the email was delivered and when the recipient reads the envelope content. So if your brand name is, say, 10 characters long, then you have a solid 10 characters left that you can use to say something else to enhance your message.

Taking advantage of this opportunity can increase your unique open rates by 1.3%, according to Oracle Digital Experience Agency research that compared the performance of campaigns that used from name extensions and those that didn’t. Only 40% of brands use from name extensions for any of their email campaigns, so many organizations are missing out on this relatively easy-to-execute tactic.

If you’re unsure of how to use those extra characters, we have some suggestions based on what we’ve seen brands do and what we’ve done with our clients.

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog