Today, when building your business’s web presence, it is easier than ever to create custom email addresses. You can pay your website builder or hosting provider for a yearly subscription to their email server, using your business’s domain name. Then you can add your business email to your Outlook or Apple Mail app.
But why is this so important? There are a number of reasons you should pay for this service.
In today’s world, web presence is so important for businesses. If you’re not on the web, it’s as if you don’t exist at all. People will instill trust in a business with a strong online presence. Furthermore, without a solid web presence, people will not take your business seriously. Many people will never know your business even exists, no matter how good your products or services are. Your email address has a big impact on your web presence.
While a Gmail account is incredibly useful and totally free, you don’t want your business email to end in gmail.com. Here’s why.
Public perception
The first and most basic reason you need a customised email address for your business is because of public perception of non-customised addresses. Consider the following scenario. You receive an email from a business providing landscaping services telling you about what they do. Their email is from a customised address. Another company in the same industry emails you from a Gmail address. Which are you more likely to choose based on this information alone?
You might take other factors into consideration, but your perception has already been skewed by a simple reality – you know that one company paid for their email address. This already implies that they take themselves more seriously and therefore put money into making their business the best it can be.
The truth is that the company with the customised email address might not be as good as the other, but the initial perception is huge. By sending from a free domain, you are putting yourself at an immediate disadvantage.
Branding
Another reason you need a customised email address is that your branding should span throughout your entire business. When every staff member is sending emails from your business’s domain name, it puts your business at the forefront of people’s minds at all times. If they are sending emails to a number of different companies, they know exactly who they are talking to by looking at your email address.
It also makes it easier to search for emails from your company and to get in touch with other members of staff. By using a standardised procedure to set staff email addresses, potential clients can get in touch with a staff member even if they have not had direct communication with them before.
Company identity
Your staff also matter when it comes to customised email addresses. With your own domain as the email, your staff get to identify themselves as part of the company. They can send emails on the company’s behalf and have their name associated with the company.
By giving everyone email addresses with free domain names, you are preventing a company identity from forming. They don’t feel like a valued part of your company, as people may not trust that they are even associated with your company based on their email addresses.
Separation of work and personal addresses
When you don’t give your staff customised email addresses, this can lead to another problem. They may send clients emails from their personal addresses, which can be extremely problematic, especially if you want to keep all communications within the company. Instead of sending emails on behalf of the company, they can start sending them on their own behalf.
This also opens the door to them accidentally sending personal emails to clients and vice versa. This is something that can happen to you too, so be careful to keep them separate.
Impressions
You don’t have to always use your customised email address. Having a Gmail account specifically for work communications can help when you have an established relationship with a client. At this point, you do not need to impress them or show them you are a serious business. You may need to share Google Docs or Sheets with them, and communicating this via Gmail accounts is far easier.
That said, only move over to your non-customised account when you are already in business with the person. There is an intimacy to doing so at this point, as you are showing them your trust. If you do this too quickly, it might do the opposite, and imply that your use of a customised email address was merely a way of getting them to take you seriously.
A customised email address is incredibly important for your business. If you stick to a free domain name, you will lose potential clients.
Disclaimer: No Asian Age journalist was involved in creating this content. The group also takes no responsibility for this content.
