First impressions are crucial in business. However, you may be missing out on an easy way to improve yours with a custom email address. While an email client like Gmail or Yahoo may seem to be an easy solution to your business email needs, free accounts lack the professionalism of a custom email address.
Consumers nowadays are bombarded by emails and many will get deleted before being read. People are selective about which ones they open and will look carefully at the subject line and the email address in order to filter out the ones they wish to read. For this reason, it is important to have a professional-looking email address.
All you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. If you found a professional who you wanted to employ and then discovered that their email address was something like yourname@gmail.com, you would probably be a little concerned.
An email address is an extension of a business (indeed almost an advertisement for it). Personal emails such as yourname@hotmail.com should be kept for personal correspondence, and business emails should ideally be in the form of yourname@yourbusiness.com.
Reasons Why A Professional Email Address Is Important For Your Business
Customers today are flooded with emails – and become selective on what they open. It is vitally important to make the first best impression with your prospects. With that in mind, here are the 10 reasons why you should use your domain name (yourname@yourbusiness.com) as your professional email address.
First Impressions Are Important
If you’re trying to build a professional brand for your business, first impressions are important. Email is one of the most common forms of communication with your potential clients. A professional email address creates a sense of trust, especially if it is from a credible website. This will boost your company’s potential to attract new customers.
Branding
Branding is not just for large corporations, it’s important for small businesses as well. Having a professional email address is a big part of maintaining a unified image. But branding is more than just an image. It’s your reputation, how people perceive you. It’s how they feel about your products or services, and your customer service team.
Trustworthiness
Associating the name of your business to your professional email address adds a buzz of interest to potential clients.
Can you just imagine receiving an email from yourbusinessname@yahoo.com instead of info@yourbusinessname.com. Chances are it will remain unopened or ignored.
Your professional email address can be an easy recognition of your company. Customers will also start to remember the name of your business which builds brand awareness and trust.
Clear Link To Your Website
A professional email address using your domain name makes it easy for customers to look up your company and your website for more information. This also contributes heavily to reassuring them that you are a legitimate and established business, and engenders trust. It’s a great marketing asset too – any email you send, or any time you leave your contact details with someone, you’re also giving them an easy link to your website.
Reduce the Chances of Being Flagged as Spam
Exactly because anyone can sign up for a free email address quickly and easily, they are frequently used by spammers, and as a result are often viewed with suspicion – this is why having a professional email address connected to your own domain is such a trust marker. Some spam and malware filters will automatically disable, or reroute to Junk Mail folders, emails from providers like Hotmail, for example. A professional email address reduces the risk of your business emails bouncing or being sent straight to the trash can.
If you think Gmail is a more trustworthy free email provider, we have strong reasons to convince you otherwise.
Flexibility & Control
Opting for a professional email setup means that you are able to create specific email addresses for each department that are then diverted to the relevant person/team. For example, you can have a marketing@ email address that goes to your marketing manager or the entire marketing team or a finance@ address that goes to your finance manager/team. This helps to ensure that the relevant people respond to enquiries and also means that customers do not need to know if/when someone leaves the organization as they can still send emails to, and receive emails from, the same address.
Having separate departmental email addresses should also theoretically reduce the number of emails that you receive that you would normally have to forward to someone else.
Collaborate With Your Team
Professional business email hosting typically come bundled with other features like shared calendars which make collaborating with your colleagues much easier. You can send and manage meeting requests, view your workmates’ calendars and check their availability, and even hold virtual meetings and work on shared documents at the same time using these kinds of tools.
Take Action by Choosing a Professional Email Address
Contact your current website host to see if it is possible to have your own business email address. If not, there are plenty of hosting providers such as Microsoft 365, Zoho, Rediff, Google Workspace, and many more!