A Single Email Detail Tweak in Marketo that Sky-Rocketed Open Rates by 25% for a Digital Marketing Company

A/B Testing for “From Address” Optimization in Marketo

A major digital marketing company was noticing stagnant email open rates and low engagement across its campaigns.

Despite sending high-quality content and targeting relevant audiences, the open rates were lower than expected.

The company’s email team suspected that the “From Address” – the name and email address used to send marketing emails – might be impacting recipients’ willingness to open emails.

Without a clear understanding of what worked best for their diverse audience, the team struggled to improve engagement rates effectively.

Solution

Xgrid helped the digital marketing company by running an A/B test to test the impact of different “From Address” configurations on email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and conversion rates.

The approach was structured as follows:

Objective Definition

The primary goal was to determine which “From Address” would yield the highest open rate, CTR, and conversion rate.

Secondary goals included understanding how the “From Address” impacted user engagement and trust.

Variables Tested

• Sender Name: Testing a personal name (e.g., “John from [Brand]”) versus a more formal company name (e.g., “[Brand] Support”).
• Sender Email Address: Testing branded email addresses (e.g., john@brand.com) versus generic ones (e.g., info@brand.com).
• Combination: Testing a combination of a personal name with a branded email address (e.g., “John from [Brand]” with john@brand.com).

Test Groups

The audience was segmented into two test groups:

• Group A received emails from a personal name.
• Group B received emails from the company name.

Experiment Design

The subject line, email content, and sending time were kept constant across both test groups to isolate the impact of the “From Address” alone.

Results Analysis

After 48 hours, the team compared the metrics of each test group, focusing on the open rate, CTR, and conversion rate. Statistical significance tests were applied to ensure that the differences observed were not due to random chance.