Why You Should Use A Professional Email Address

A professional email address is more important than you may think, at first. Let’s say you’re searching online for a professional service, like a dentist or a bakery to make the perfect wedding cake.  You do a thorough Google search and find a few candidates with good reviews. Everything looks pretty good until you hit their contact page and there it is.  You click the email link and you see jenny.baker.weddingcakes18871@gmail.com.

Now say you’re at a business networking mixer and find a promising freelancer to do some graphic design for a flyer you’re putting together.  He hands you his business card and says get in touch with him.  You get his card and bam —  John.photoshopper872@hotmail.com.

Unprofessional email addresses can ruin the credibility of a business or a professional in a nanosecond. 

This is an issue that I run into way too often.  I take on a new client, with a great business idea.  They’ve obviously invested a ton of money, time and energy to make the business profitable. Then, I see they are using a gmail.com email address for their main business address.  Everything is looking cool until that moment.  So, whether you have a cool, hard-working business website up and going yet or not, at least begin by using a professional email address on your own business domain.

Here are some things to consider about your professional email address.  Three rules:

Rule #1 Always Use Your Own Domain

Even if you are in the early stages of branding your business, you can get the domain registered that you intend to use.   Start using it right away for your business email.  Get it on your business cards as soon as possible.  Don’t think that you have to run through that box of 500 cards you bought at Instaprint.  Business cards are cheap.  You can afford to print new ones and trash the unused old ones.

Also, you may find that the first domain you register isn’t quite what you end up using.  It’s still better than something.crappy1876@gmail.com.

Rule #2 Use A Standard Email Format

Using the nickname you earned during Spring Break in South Padre that summer probably isn’t appropriate for business using gmail.com.  Using it for your own business domain is just as bad.  The best business practice is to just use your name.

Having your own domain should trigger a discovery.  For, maybe, the first time in your business career, you can have the name you actually want.  No abbreviations.  No numbers.  That is a strange concept to people to have been using the free accounts for some time.  I still have clients wanting to use something cryptic when it isn’t necessary.

It’s nice being able to be simply eric@stripedape.com.  Makes me feel, somehow, special.

Now, if there are more than one of you in the company with the same name, you may have to get creative and draw straws for the cool names.  Here is a good hierarchy of formats:

1.  Frist name only.  eric@mydomain.com
   This is easy to remember and can extend a personal connection to your client.  It may get crowded if we bring on more Erics.
2. First name, last initial. erica@mydomain.com
   This is almost as memorable and will allow for multiples of the same name.  If my next site developer is named Erica, I’m back to having problems.
3. First Initial, Last Name. ealexander@mydomain.com
   This is actually the second most popular format after ‘first name only.’ It assumes that clients tend to remember last names over first names. Duplicate usernames will probably not ever be an issue. Don’t expect to hide your identity with this format, however.  You are right out in the open.
4. Full Name. ericalexander@mydomain.com
   This is popular with executives, professionals, and sole proprietors like real estate agents and doctors who consider their full name a brand.  This can still help to make your complete address more memorable.
5. Generic Functional Names.  sales@mydomain, info@mydomain.com, quotes@mydomain.com
   Generic usernames are useful to display on your website. Give visitors special email addresses to contact for support, sales, press, etc. It looks professional and keeps your business better organized. By using email forwarders, they aren’t confusing to manage.

Rule #3 Create Special Email Addresses For Your Website

The generic, functional email usernames mentioned above need some special treatment. The address you use to correspond with clients should, probably, be different from the one you display on your website. Using a personal email address on your “Contact Us” page may look unprofessional.  It might leave the impression that you are a smaller business than you would like to appear. We are not trying to deceive anyone here, but impressions are important. Not to mention, you generally don’t want to give out your personal address to everyone who stumbles on your website. There are still bots that scrape email addresses wherever they can find them for spamming.

It is very counterproductive to have a really cool ‘vanity’ email address on your own domain, just to have it spammed into oblivion.  Be selective where you toss it out.

Also, using email forwarding, you can forward a generic address to multiple places.  For instance, an email sent to Sales@YourDomain.com can be forwarded to your sales manager and to your own inbox.  That way good leads don’t fall through the cracks. An email sent to Press@YourDomain.com can be forwarded to you and your social media manager, and so on.  You see the advantage.  Leads are critically valuable.  They should never be allowed to drop down a black hole because the right eyeballs didn’t see them at the right time.

So, you see, it’s not incredibly difficult to make some small tweaks on handling email strategies in your business.  The small changes can have such an incredible effect on public impressions.  Take charge of your entire brand.