What does your business email address say about your company?

In todays digital world having a website and email address is more important than before, but what should your email address be?

• Branding
• Deliverability
• professionalism
• Costs

Branding

Your email needs to represent your brand so should be consistent with your website. What do I mean by this? A couple of things really. First up is a consistent name. Why would you create a website or brand with 1 name then have an email address from a different name?

Would this confuse your customers? Yes

Could this mean your email go unread? This definitely increases the chances of it.

So what is the best solution for branding?

Have your email coming from the same domain as your website i.e You are now on WDexplored.co.uk so would expect any email communication to come from an email address ending @wdexplored.co.uk. If I were to email from other domains such as wdclient.com then I would expect many emails to go unanswered or be rejected. With the rise of spam and scam emails if potential customers are unsure the last thing you want is your emails being marked as spam.

Deliverability

Using a random domain for sending your company emails could be doing more harm than you realise. When you send out an email to customers or even potential customers then you want them to see the email you have spent time crafting.

Have you ever wondered why some companies always ask you to check your Junk folder or Spam filter? If you did not check then you could miss an important email.

The deliverability is often over looked and there are some great tools out there to check your deliverability. check out this article from my friends at SendX. Making sure your email is set for maximum deliverability will increase your open rates and conversions.

If you send 100 emails, but only 90 get them then that is a 10% decrease across all stats.

Using a good service that is set up correctly will help your brand.

Professionalism

You want your emails to look professional and this includes the email address.

Why do Car manufacturers spend so much on door handles?

Like the email address and preview are the first interaction with a potential customer. Having a branded email says a lot about your business. it shows that you have put thought in to your business and the email is not an afterthought.

It also has perceived image that you have spent money to have a professional look so are likely to be around longer.

Costs

Getting a professional branded business email address does not have to be expensive. Many hosting companies include email hosting as part of the package. I use Siteground‘s Go Geek package . Setting up their email hosting is quick and easy even providing the detail on how to set it up on your PC, Mac, Android and iPhone.

Then there are the paid email services 2 main ones are: Google Workspaces or Microsoft 365 Business. These handle all of your emails separately so if your hosting has any issues, your email is unaffected. Also using a 3rd party for emails can give you better deliverability as long as they are setup correctly. This is where it can get a bit technical, but the paid providers all have tech support on hand to help you through the process.

With the above 2 you also get online software bundled such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentation , notes and more

Personally here at WD Explored I use Google Workplace for our email, so when setting up on a new device or linking to software, I can click on the Gmail option and the process is quick and simple.

Final Thoughts

For small businesses just starting out looking to keep costs low I can see the attraction of the free email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Live etc, but once the business has a website up there is no reason not to have a company email address. When choosing a website host or going through an agency mention email and this will be free or very cheap, then once the business grows you can upgrade to the paid for services and bring all of your emails with you.

With the extra features included with the paid for services, could that cost remove the need for office software and be part of a disaster recovery plan or offsite backups?