When Your From is Done: Updating Your 'From' Address

There comes a time in most email marketers' lives when the email address he or she sends from needs to be changed. This change might be warranted because of an IP update, a change to a new email marketing service provider, a hosting update, aesthetic concerns or other reasons.

When a change like this must be made, what should be done? Two of the most critical goals are:

• Do your best to ensure that deliverability does not suffer when you begin sending from the new email address.
   
• Make sure subscribers recognize that the new 'from' address is you and do not hit the spam or unsubscribe button in error.

After a thorough whitelisting process, what’s next? Do you alert your subscribers about the new email address, if so how?

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) recently tackled this issue. In their case they are updating their ‘from’ email address, 'mfamail@mfa.org, to info@email.mfa.org. The reason for the switch is not made clear in the email creative — nor does it need to be. However, the new email address does contain some similar characteristics as the original but uses 'info' before the '@' instead of 'mfamail.' The 'info@' handle is more accurate and widely recognized than 'mfamail@.'

MFA sent this email prior to using the new email address. This is smart for a variety of reasons:   

• This allows time for subscribers to update their contact list with the new email address prior to the new address going live.
   
• Sending information about the new email address while still using the old email address should help with deliverability once the new address is used. It is less effective to send a change-of-address email using the new email address because there is a chance that some recipients never see the email due to spam filtering.
   
• MFA is also following a best practice by asking their subscribers to add their email address to their safe senders list (i.e. address book) in the header of the email.  Adding this to the footer text would also be a good idea.
   
• MFA is also wise to limit the creative message to just the email address change — this eliminates the possibility of such vital information getting lost among clutter.

Here is the creative from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  The subject line is: "Our e-mail address is changing"