An electronic calling card of sorts, your email address makes a subtle, but lasting impression upon would-be clients and peers. If you’re doing business online and trading information via email, your choice of an address can help others perceive you as a responsible entity with whom they can reliably do business. No, SlickDaddy99@GenericHostingService.com simply isn’t going to cut it.
With that in mind, adhering to the following professional email address guidelines will get you a lot more traction in this regard.
Using Your Own Domain Is Crucial
Employing a generic email domain suffix is one of the fastest ways to say, “I’m running a fly-by-night operation on the cheap.” While there was a time when a custom domain was a “nice-to-have,” it is now a “must.” Wholly indicative of your professionalism, experience and dedication, you simply have to have a branded mail address in today’s business environment.
Beyond that though, spam filters tend to weed out nonspecific domain names. This can prevent your messages from reaching those with whom you need to conduct business. What’s more, because your email address appears everywhere you send a message, it’s one of the least expensive ways to generate marketing impressions.
Nicknames Are Tacky—Avoid Them
If you had to guess, what would you say SlickDaddy99’s interests are? Either nobody knows, or nobody wants to know. And that’s bad for business.
Why leave your reputation open to interpretation? Always go with your name. This lets your colleagues know the message is from you right away.
Within that though, the exact format you choose will be predicated by a number of factors. If your organization is large, you’ll likely need to include full first and last names to differentiate between the five different Seans you employ or the three Janes you have on staff. This is also a good way to make a smaller organization look larger.
Use Special Addresses for Various Functions
Addresses such as CustomerService@MyCompany.com, Information@MyCompany.Com and Sales@MyCompany.com, can be used to route messages to specific areas of the business, while maintaining the anonymity of key people—until they want to disclose their direct addresses.
In addition to being a useful security measure, this gives you the capability of having a single message sent to several people at once in any given department. Sales messages can go to your sales managers, Customer Service messages can go to your customer service managers as well as you so you can keep an eye on things and so on.
Keeping these professional email address guidelines in mind when you’re establishing your communications protocols will improve the image of your business and help it run more efficiently. With domains more affordable than ever and scams proliferating at an ever-increasing rate, using your own domain name is no longer an option, it’s standard operating procedure.
If you don’t have a profession email set up, visit Yahoo Small Business to get yours today! You can now get a free professional email account, and free one page website, when you register a domain name. So there’s no longer any reason to use a generic address for your small business.
