Please, please, I beg of you…if you have a website for your business (and you absolutely should), PLEASE use your website domain name for your email address.
One of the first things you should do after securing your website domain name and hosting is to set up your professional email address using that domain. If there is one thing that really bothers me, it’s a professional giving me their email address and it’s a Gmail, Hotmail, or worse an AOL. 🙄
I guess it’s the nature of what I do, but it makes me question the legitimacy of a business if they are still using a free email account.
If you have a domain name (a website), you should have a professional email address using that domain. Let me repeat that…if you have a website, you should be using a professional email address.
Here are a few reasons why:
- Again, it legitimizes your business.
Imagine a lawyer handing you a business card with this email address: attyjanesmith1@gmail.com. My immediate thought is that this lawyer doesn’t take their business seriously enough to set up a professional email account. In what other ways are they not professional? They could be a wonderful and professional lawyer, but the email address gives a different impression. - It’s better for your branding.
When you give your email address to someone as yourname@lawfirmname.com, they can assume that your website is lawfirmname.com and are likely to go to your website to find out more about your business. - It’s easier to remember.
Did he say “agent-smith@yahoo.com” or “agent.smith@yahoo.com”? I can’t remember. - Less confusion.
There is a person in Illinois who has the same name as me and has a Gmail account almost identical to mine. I have received correspondence from her friends, businesses she has interacted with, I know her address, and even what kind of car she drives. Earlier this year, her son accidentally sent me $1000 through Zelle by using the incorrect email account. That could have been a whole disaster for them! (We sorted it out and the money was returned.) I am sure that you don’t want to have any mishaps like that happen to your business.(Side note: Sabrina in Illinois, if you are out there, your Dodge Journey is due for a tire rotation.) - Ownership has its privileges.
Your free email account can be canceled/revoked at any time. Hotmail may shut down (unlikely, but not entirely out of the question). You would lose access to that account and people won’t be able to contact you. When you own your domain, you can change your hosting should there be a problem and get your email address back up and running in no time.
But I don’t want another email address
I know what you are thinking. “Sabrina, I already have too many email addresses. I can’t manage another one. Besides, I’ve had this Gmail account for ages and so many people have that address already. I don’t want to have to send out “change of address” messages.” Well, let me help make it easier for you.
Setting up your professional email address
You have a couple of options for this.
- You can use your website hosting service and set up an email address there. This is usually a fairly basic email and is easy to set up through your host. Some hosts provide this at no additional cost.
- You can use a paid service like Microsoft Office 365 which comes with additional features such as access to Microsoft Office software online.
- You can set up Google’s G Suite to handle your professional email. It’s basically Gmail with your own domain. This is also a paid service, with a fairly small fee associated with it.
It’s really up to you how you want to handle this. I do a combination of things because I have several professional accounts. My main business account is set up through Office 365. The rest use my website hosting service to host the email accounts. I forward any incoming mail from these accounts to my main business account!
Forwarding mail
Yes, you can forward your professional email to your personal account so that you don’t have to check multiple different accounts. Check with your email host to find out how to do this. The only catch here is that if you reply to those messages directly from your personal account, the email will come from your personal account. There are ways around this, but they are more complicated and I’ll leave those for another time.
If all else fails…
If you need help setting up a professional email address, contact Astrid Digital or your IT professional.
