By Justin Premick, Education Marketing Director at AWeber

Like most email marketers, you’ve probably obsessed over your subject lines, trying to pack in as much compelling information as you can while keeping the subject as short as possible.

But have you ever thought about the other half of what your email subscribers see when they find an email from you in their inbox?  The “from” line that you use with your emails can impact the success of your campaigns, but it doesn’t get nearly as much attention from email marketers as it merits.

For starters, have you ever thought about how long your “from” line should be?

It’s an important consideration. After all, if your “from” line is too long, your subscribers’ email programs will cut it off, making it harder for subscribers to know who’s sending them that great email.

After receiving several emails with really long “from” lines recently, I set out to do some testing to see exactly where the cutoff points are in major email programs. So I created an email with a long “from” line (32 characters) and sent test copies to addresses in a variety of email programs in Windows, Mac and mobile environments.

So how long can your “from” line be before subscribers’ email programs truncate it?

Here are the cutoff points from my test. Operating systems are in parentheses.

Yahoo! (Windows XP) – 22 characters

Yahoo! (Mac OSX) – 22

Gmail (XP) – 24

Gmail (OSX) – 24

Windows Live Hotmail (XP) – 23

Windows Live Hotmail (OSX) – 21

AOL Webmail (XP) – 24*

AOL Webmail (OSX) – 24*

Microsoft Outlook 2007 (XP) – 32**

Mozilla Thunderbird (XP) – 32**

iPhone Mail (iPhone) – 20

Gmail (G1 Android mobile phone) – 24

* AOL Webmail shows the sender’s email address, not their name.

** Outlook and Thunderbird displayed the entire “from” line. I did not test to see just how many characters they would display. It should be noted that I used their default settings when testing, but that individual users can easily widen or narrow the “from” column in those programs.

So what does this mean?

1. When possible, try to keep your “from” line to about 21-24 characters. That way, it will display it its entirety, both in desktop environments like Outlook and all of the major webmail environments.

2. If you do go with a “from” line longer than 21-24 characters, make sure that you can still clearly see who the sender is in those initial characters. Use the name of your company, or another highly recognizable element, in the first part of the “from” line.

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Justin Premick is the Education Marketing Director at AWeber. Read more at his blog, www.aweber.com/blog .

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010, 5:55 pm   |   Email marketing, General Marketing  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback