Setting up your professional email service can be confusing. You’re not alone in wondering how on earth you’re going to figure out all of the things you can do with your brand new email set up. Now that you’ve decided to subscribe to a professional email service, this article will help you get the most out of it.
Professional Business Email Set Up Tips
A professional email address signals to your recipients you are serious about how your business or your brand looks. Congratulations. You have joined the wider business community who know the best way to gain trust when sending email messages is to have a domain email address. After all, when you see emails in your inbox every day from all over the place, don’t you look first at the address to check it’s a safe email to read? So do your customers.
An email address from a business usually takes the form sender@mybusiness.com and because it looks like an authentic business address, it increases the likelihood of your message being read.
What is Professional Email?
Professional email is a combination of having a domain email address linked to your website domain name and email hosting. Domain plus email. For example, mybusiness.com is the domain and when someone looks up your website it is used this way www.mybusiness.com or https://mybusiness.com.
When someone gets an email from you, something goes before the domain name mybusiness.com. The ‘@’ symbol. So now you have a domain email address called xxxx@mybusiness.com.
Sure, you might not need email hosting if you are just starting out because you won’t send too many emails. As soon as you build a list of customers, and want to protect their data and send to them regularly, email hosting can really help you out.
Tip #1 Choose a good email hosting provider
When you’re looking to use a business email service, you’ll want everything to look professional across all of your online communications. Look for a brand with a good reputation, look at their website, check they’ve got what you need, and if they are reasonable on price. Most top brands offer a free trial first.
Why do you need a Professional Email address?
Why you need a professional email address comes down to this. Can you guess the one reason why many well-crafted emails end up in the spam pile? It’s because they just don’t look right. They don’t have the right address.
Tip #2 Make the right first impression
What people refer to as ‘professional email’ is an address with your business name after the ‘@’ symbol. If you don’t have one, in a split second, you can find your message relegated to the unsubscribed bench or worse, the spam table, even if someone gave you permission to contact them by email.
It’s very unfair, but the one time you send something to your readers they don’t trust, this can happen.
Tip #3 Use a memorable address
Unfortunately, new business owners and those new to building an email list make this mistake all the time. They use a personal address. They’re just so eager to send their amazing sales-crafted email or snappy blog pitch. Out it goes via Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, or some other generic ending used by millions of the populace for personal email reasons.
It’s much better to use an email address for professional reasons in this format:
myname@mybusinessname.com or myname@myblogname.com
Because we’re all members of so many websites, clubs, shopping schemes, news feeds, and social media groups, it is important to help readers quickly identify your email is from your business or personal brand.
A strong brand is memorable. Why dilute it by using a generic extension?
Tip #4 Create a Brand
If you turned up at an invitation-only event you’d make an effort to obey the dress-code, right? I mean, why would you risk being the only one in the room who looks out of place?
Apply the same idea to why you need a professional branded email address. If your well-crafted email arrives in somebody’s inbox it’s like arriving at their party. At the inbox ‘party’, you need to make a dynamic first impression and arrive using your name. That’s the part containing @mybusinessname or @myblogname. Everyone knows who you are.
If you truly want to promote your brand or your business, you’d better look the part with a professional email address.
Tip #5 A Professional Email Address is easy to use
To help you easily run your business, there’s a range of office and collaboration tools to help you send and receive documents, downloads, and content files. A professional email address matching your website address where messages arrive from a recognized safe sender service (because you’re using reputable hosting), makes everything run smoothly.
Keeping up with your personal email accounts is easy to do too because you can link them into your account.
Custom Domain Business Email Benefits
Billions of emails are sent every year, and the majority of them are business marketing emails. The sheer volume of data to process and the need to have the latest security protocols in place has seen a huge growth in third-party services – like the provision of custom domain business email addresses and hosting. A big benefit these services provide is security.
Tip #6 Security is built-in.
It is surprising that for little more than $12/year or less (I’m looking at Namecheap’s Professional Business Email plans here) security is built into the product, designed to vastly improve your capacity to store and send emails, and scale your enterprise while keeping your customers’ privacy. And yours. Now that’s cost-effective for less than $1 a month.
You get WHOIS internet privacy (free with most providers) and your contact details are protected by the domain registrar. Most offer anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-malware with a commitment to deliver the latest cybercrime protection.
How to create a professional email address
The last three tips are going to deal with creating the best address you can.
Tip #7 Choose the right domain name
There are two ways to choose a name for your business. The first is a professional service using your domain name, and for a business or brand, domain ownership is a sensible choice. You’ll find buying a domain is very easy, and much cheaper than you might think. A domain name search tool will tell you quickly if your name is available.
If Gary Glenville who does haircuts wanted a domain email address this might look like Gary.Glenville@haircuts.com but first, he’d need to buy the domain haircuts.com.
What if he was not quite ready to pay as a small enterprise as casual as a few haircuts on the weekend for local clients doesn’t make much profit yet? Then, there is a second way. He might have to try a few names to keep his address smart and sensible, or a combination name like Garyglenvillehaircuts@gmail.com where Gary Glenville and Haircuts make up one word.
Anyone can create a personal email address with a provider like Gmail or Yahoo. It can be a starter for you, to try out your professional business name for free. One proviso, your name might not always be available or you might have to add random numbers to it. Garyglenvillehaircuts27@gmail.com doesn’t have the same impact but might be all you need to start with.
Tip #8 Select a Provider with Benefits
I’m going to be straight up and say if you do invest in a professional email address you need to go with a brand provider. One with a Knowledgebase is best, to look up things when you get stuck. A 24/7 customer support for help and preferably chat, so you can go back to their tips and links. A brand provider will have top security features and a development team behind it, not just listed as part of your email product, but as part of the company ethos.
Finally, you should be able to get one offering a free trial period. For all of these benefits rolled into one provider, I’ll recommend Namecheap’s Professional Business Email today. The second-largest domain seller in the world has a top draw email service for under $12/year and all the benefits I’ve mentioned in this article as making up a good package. There’s also a free trial period of 60 days which is longer than most and gives you a nice amount of time to try their service.
Tip #9 Additional benefits
Some additional benefits you get from a Namecheap level provider help with the day-to-day tasks of marketing. You might not always want to receive emails into your main business address. Your messages might be trying to capture leads through a marketing campaign you are running. Something you need to think about is what other email names your business address might use to catch leads. You want to use alias names which are email-forward accounts and only receive email.
To use this additional feature, first identify the area in your email dashboard where you can make an alias. If you can’t find it you can read more about email alias accounts here. Usually, there’s a minimum of ten available to you.
How about making some of these to get you started:
info@mybusiness.com
sales@mybusiness.com
myname@mybusiness.com
hello@mybusiness.com
offers@mybusiness.com
You don’t need to use them all at once and you can change them at any time, which is handy.
Tip #10 Keep Secured and Safe
What you may not realize is how important it is for small businesses, especially, to use email hosting. Once you start gathering a lot of customer data, addresses, and using lists or databases to send messages out – before you know it you’ll have a lot on your mind. With one in five small businesses suffering a cyber attack in 2019, most of which were email phishing attacks, it’s important to have the latest email security.
To protect your operations and keep your customers, it’s much easier if you start on a plan with a provider. Make sure they’ve got a full developer team behind them. Namecheap Professional Email is one such provider service I can think of which offers enterprise-level security and all the benefits mentioned in this article right from the starter package. All for under $12/year or with two months free trial. You can manage your domain, or pick up a new one with them and much more. There’s a lot to recommend the world’s second-largest domain hosting company.
With professionals letting 200 emails a day through their inboxes but only responding to 25% of these (according to The Harvard Business Review), most email open rates usually figure somewhere in the low double digits. Improve your chances of being one of the emails people act upon. Gain your customers’ trust and improve your open rates by securing a unique, customized email address that aligns with your domain.Like the sound of Namecheap? Readers, if you need email, be quick to get hold of 25% off all their Private Email plans. Alternately, Namecheap offer a free Private Email trial for 60 days with an opt-in to keep your plan only if you are sure.