Right wording on emails is as important as on your website, it can make the difference between reaching your customers or making them to quickly delete your messages.

Email “From” field is what I would like to point out today, being from my point of view an extremely important usability issue. The From (or Sender) field has to tell the user not only the sender but also has to tell a little bit about the content of the email. The importance of this could vary depending on the email client you are using, if yours is Gmail this is very important as Google is displaying your messages in two columns, putting the sender on first place and on a second one the subject. The user see first the sender, then the subject:

A very good example of proper wording and usability is provided by the German airline Germanwings. In the picture below it is possible to see how they differentiate the emails they send to customers. The one coming from sender Germanwings is the general newsletter from the company, users know they can delete it if they are not in the mood of reading advertising.

Important emails are labeled by Germanwings in a different way. In the example, you can see on the second line an email coming from “Germanwings Schedule Cha.”; in this case without even reading the subject the user knows that she shouldn’t delete that message before reading it. With this simple technique Germanwings is rising the probability of this important message to be read, avoiding more passengers to miss the schedule change and also improving the customer satisfaction.

Very well done is the sender label of the third Germanwings example, they use the sender “Germanwings Booking” for emails containing your flight information. Once again, the user knows that this email is important without reading the subject. This label also makes emails easier to find when needed.

Bad usability example could be the one in the picture below. The business networking site Xing send invoices with a sender “mailrobot”. It is clear that many users could easily confuse this email with spam.

Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.