Sunday, April 24, 2011

How important is your email address?

Small businesses look to the industry leaders for examples of how to best represent themselves as they strive to grow. Companies spend thousands of dollars making sure their logo, company colors, message and image are consistently and professionally represented. Their successful examples can usually be followed by other business as a template of professionalism.


One area that seems to be overlooked is the importance of your email address being consistent with your business. New businesses starting out are signing up for free email accounts, (ie:Gmail,Yahoo, etc.) as their business email, instead of using an email address with their company website name. Many people will add a second “business” email to an existing personal AOL account. Free email addresses say: I’m new, I’m small and I’m cheap; which is usually not the image a small business wants to project. 


Websites mirror the image of the company, many times with the company name as the website and/or domain name. To maintain a consistent professional image of your business your email address should be the same as your website address. Christine@mycompanyname.com, has a more professional image than mycompanyname@gmail.com

This shows not only a level of professionalism, but also assures your customer that you really are with the company. With growth of email scams, this one little area may make a huge difference to the very prospect you are attempting to reach.

Most website packages come with a minimum of at least one email address, which your webmaster could have forwarded to your free or aol address if you only want one area to check emails. This way it can still be convenient for you, yet show the most professional image for your company, large or small.

We placed a poll on a previous blog and the results seem to say the same thing:

How important is it to your professional image to have a business email address (yourname@yourbusinessname.com) instead of a free email address.

Essential 48%
Very Important 25%
Not Important 7%
No Difference 11%
Don’t know 9%