What are the drawbacks of changing the 'from' address in email marketing?
Summary
What email marketers say11Marketer opinions
Email marketer from HubSpot explains that a consistent 'From' address supports brand consistency, which helps nurture trust with your audience. Changing it can confuse recipients and hurt your brand image.
Email marketer from Email on Acid shares that it is important to warm up a new 'From' address. This involves slowly increasing the volume of emails sent from the new address to build a positive reputation with ISPs.
Email marketer from StackOverflow shares that a frequent change in 'From' addresses can be flagged as suspicious behavior and can negatively impact deliverability over time due to changing authentication records (SPF, DKIM).
Email marketer from Litmus explains that changing the 'From' address can impact brand recognition. Subscribers may no longer recognize the email, leading to lower open rates and higher spam complaints.
Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that changing the 'From' address can hurt deliverability if not warmed up. Recipient engagement history is tied to the 'From' address, so a change could lead to lower open rates initially.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that anyone who added the sender to their allow-lists or created rules may suffer, but otherwise, it should not create an issue.
Email marketer from ActiveCampaign explains that changing the 'From' address can result in a dip in open rates and an increase in unsubscribe rates, especially if subscribers do not immediately recognize the new sender.
Email marketer from Mailjet explains that changing the 'From' address impacts sender reputation. Email providers track reputation based on IP address, domain, and sender address. A sudden change may trigger spam filters.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that subscribers may have created filters based on the old 'From' address. A change will bypass those filters, potentially impacting inbox placement.
Email marketer from SuperOffice explains that changing the 'From' address can erode subscriber trust and familiarity, potentially leading to lower engagement and higher spam complaints.
Email marketer from Gmass explains that maintaining a consistent 'From' address helps build a recognizable and trusted sender identity, improving deliverability and engagement over time.
What the experts say6Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks shares that when they switched from noreply@ to email@, they split the audience of a large send 50/50 to test and saw zero statistically significant differences in any of the 20+ metrics evaluated, with no positive or negative impact.
Expert from Word to the Wise, Laura Atkins, responds that changing the from address impacts reputation because filters learn what users expect and want from a specific from address. Changing it disrupts those learned patterns.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that there are multiple levels of allow lists. If a user puts your from address in their address book that will lead to your mail going to their inbox in a lot of mail clients, including the webmail providers. There are also domain and IP allow lists but those are much less common these days.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that reputation exists on the name/email, but engaged users shouldn't really see a difference.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that everything in an email can have reputation associated with it to some degree, from, DKIM, IP, Domain, etc. Changing the alias of the email should be relatively small, but the impact could be greater than 0 so test and monitor.
Expert from Word to the Wise, Dennis Dayman, responds that changing the from address impacts sender authentication because consistency helps build trust and recognition with recipients. A sudden change may trigger spam filters and lower engagement rates. Ensure you maintain consistent branding.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools explains that even if the IP address remains the same, drastically changing the 'From' address could trigger reputation adjustments with Google's filtering systems.
Documentation from RFC 2822 details that changes in sender identity can confuse automated filtering systems which rely on consistent sender information to categorize email.
Documentation from SparkPost explains that changing the 'From' address requires updating your authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to ensure proper authentication. Failure to do so can significantly damage your sender reputation.
Documentation from Microsoft SNDS describes that changing the 'From' address will generate a new profile and associated data. This resets any positive or negative scores you had, and can impact filtering decisions.