Problem:
Manually updating the sender name and email address for hundreds of emails can take dozens of hours.
Solution:
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Create custom fields for
Send From NameandSend From Email Addresswith default values that equal the name and email address you want to send from. -
Use these fields in the Email Editor Settings as the From Name and From Email Address.
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If the name or address ever needs to change then simply update the value in the Custom Field and you’re done!
Pro-Tip: Multiple Senders? You can create multiple Send From fields. For example, we used the following naming convention:
Send From Name MarketingSend From Name SalesSend From Name CEOSend From Email Address MarketingSend From Email Address SalesSend From Email Address CEO
Don’t forget to make sure that the email signature is a Message Variable so it too can easily be updated!
The Long Version:
We had over 300 automated emails being sent from an employee who left the company and needed to be updated. Both the sender details and the signature were originally created manually which meant there was no way around manually updating each email.
Not wanting to update these manually ever again, we created six custom fields so that our emails could be sent from a marketing person, a sales person, or a CEO person.
Each person has one field for name and one field for the email address. Two important things to remember when creating these fields:
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Make sure the Default Value is set to the value you want. Ex:
(Send From Name Marketing=Jane Doe)
(Send From Email Address Marketing=jdoe@company.xyz) -
Make sure nothing accidentally writes to that field at the contact level or it will overwrite your sender name.
Lastly we created three Message Variables for the email signatures so that these could also be updated in one place. Again, we made one for…
- Marketing:
%signature-marketing% - Sales:
%signature-sales% - CEO:
%signature-ceo%
After two days of tag-teaming the 300+ emails with a coworker we are now able to change every email sender name, email address, and signature instantly by updating the Custom Field and Message Variable respectively.
Vote For This Feature 
This is not a perfect solution and is bound to run into issues.
ActiveCampaign should have a native solution for creating a variable field for email send name and email address. It is not uncommon for a need to change email senders. Marketo solves this with Tokens that are separate from Custom Fields so they don’t write to the contact level.
I’ve created an idea for it here. Please vote for it:
Reply if you’ve run into issues with this hack or know a way to improve it.
Happy emailing!
Ben