If starting a website or business is your goal this year, add ‘creating a custom email address’ onto your list of things to do.
Branding your company is to ensure that potential customers know exactly what your brand is, and that you look professional. In order to ensure consistent branding, use a custom email address that coincides with your registered domain name.
If you’re still not convinced that you need a custom email address, here are a few other reasons why you absolutely need one for your business.
It screams unprofessional. If your argument against a custom email address is that Gmail and Yahoo provide perfectly good free ones, consider this: if you were thinking about spending a fair amount of money with a company, which salesperson email would you feel more confident in – MoonLuv235@gmail.com or sales@businessgrowth.com.au ?
Using free email addresses detracts from the value you want to offer your customers. They’re too busy trying to figure out why you didn’t spring for the nominal cost of a custom email address than wanting to buy from you. And since your competitors all use custom email addresses, that might be the single factor that sends business elsewhere. If you’re thinking that an email address shouldn’t validate your credibility, it does, on some subconscious level.
You could already be paying for it. It’s not as if getting a custom email address costs anything more than what you’re already paying. If you’ve purchased a domain name for your website, you already have the ability to use that domain name registration for your email address.
You can standardise email addresses. This is especially important as you grow your staff: when you have your own custom email addresses, you can use a format for all other email addresses. So maybe you use firstname@company.com, this provides consistency in your business, and customers can easily remember the formula for your company email addresses.
When you use free emails, you’re at the mercy of whatever usernames are still available. If your name is John Smith, good luck getting that email without adding all kinds of characters and numbers to the address.
When someone leaves your company, you keep control. What happens when your Marketing Manager leaves, taking her personal email with her? If she was using it to conduct business for your organisation, you won’t be able to access those emails.
On the other hand, if you set up an account under her name, you can redirect those emails to go to your newly hired Marketing Manager. Or, you could create a generic email for certain roles, like marketingmanager@ourbusiness.com.au so that the new hire just takes over management of that account. They would just need to change the display name to their own.
A branded email does your marketing for you. Have you ever seen someone’s email address on a business card and looked up the website because you were curious? That doesn’t happen with free email addresses. But, if you use your domain in your website, you’re getting your brand in front of more eyeballs.
That email address should appear in each employee’s email signature, as well as on business cards and marketing materials. Every place you have that branded email address is one more opportunity to attract new customers.
You can create as many email addresses as you want. Even if you’re a one-person operation, you can create emails for different purposes like sales, customer service, orders, etc. This can give the impression that your company is larger than it is (which is not a bad thing), and in the event that one day you hire for those roles, you can simply assign those email addresses to other employees.
Considering how cheap a website hosting account is and since most include email as part of the low-cost package, and considering how unsafe it is to use a free email service, there is no reason why every employee at your small business shouldn’t be using your company email account. The advertising alone will make it worth the extra amount you spend on the domain name, and email service.
Host Geek has fantastic plans for you to take your emails to the next level. Go to Basic Email Hosting to find out more about it.
