Posted June 13, 2021 by Lee
When you run a business, every interaction that you have with a customer leaves an impression. It’s important to make yourself appear professional, which means putting consideration into your phone manner and your email etiquette. But people often underestimate how much difference their email address can make.
Your email address is the first thing that the customer sees before they have even opened the email, and if it isn’t right, it can immediately give the wrong impression of your business. If you are using a free email account like Gmail, for example, that can make you look very amateurish, which puts people off.
A branded email address with your business name in it, on the hand, makes you appear very professional. In fact, this is what people come to expect of any successful business, so not having a branded email address puts you at a serious disadvantage. Using a dedicated company email address when corresponding with customers can benefit you in a lot of different ways.
How Can A Branded Email Address Benefit Your Business?
It Gives You More Authority
Setting up a free email account takes two minutes and most of us have at least one. If you use a free account that anybody could set up, you are not demonstrating authority and positioning yourself as a notable figure in the industry. You’re just another one of the millions of people with an email account.
But when you use a branded email, it shows people that you have invested in a business domain name and a matching email account. Even though they don’t know anything about your business yet, they can immediately see that you are a serious company and that sense of authority immediately helps you build trust with them.
Using a company email address gives you more credibility when you are responding to customer complaints and reviews too because people feel as though they are dealing with somebody that can actually get things done, rather than a personal email account that could belong to anybody.
It Boosts Your Brand
Finding ways to boost your brand is so important, and a branded email is one of the simplest ways to do that. Your domain name and email address help the customer to remember your company name. If you are using a free service that doesn’t include your business name, they might not remember what you are called later on. Even though they want to find your site and browse your products, they don’t know what to search, so they won’t bother and you’ll lose a potential sale.
Your domain helps solidify your company name in the minds of potential customers too, especially if they see it on signage or business cards etc. Cementing your brand is all about consistency, and that needs to extend to your email address too.
It Removes Distractions
When you use a Gmail address for your business communications, you’re promoting Google before you promote yourself. Even if they are not a direct competitor of your business, that’s still a problem because it distracts from your business message. People get a lot of emails and most of them are junk, so if you want your loyal customers to open your emails, you need to jump out and grab them. A professional email address with your business name immediately tells them that this is a valuable email that they want to read, but if you use a generic free account, it fades into the background and the name distracts from your message.
It’s never good for your marketing messages to be tied to another business’s brand.
It Gets You Past Spam Filters
Spam filters are there to protect users against malicious emails and filter out a lot of the junk emails that they get. Most scammers will use a free email service of some kind and they often pose as a business offering a discount of some kind or asking customers to log into their account. If your business sends out legitimate marketing emails using a free account, they can easily be mistaken for scam emails by the spam filter. Unless customers are checking their junk folder on a regular basis, they’ll miss out on important communications from you and your email marketing campaigns will be a waste of time.
But when you use a branded email address, the spam filter is more likely to recognise the email as legitimate, especially if the customer has opened emails from you in the past. This will drastically increase the open rate of your emails.
It Protects Your Business Data
Free email services are often prime targets for hackers because they can get a lot of personal information about people. It’s bad enough losing sensitive data about an individual, but it’s particularly damaging if your business loses private information. You are never completely safe from cyberattacks, but if you use a branded email address that is tied to a domain name, your chances of being hacked decrease a lot. You have more control over where and how your data is stored, which means that you can be proactive about protecting your business.
You have better options for backing up when using a professional email address with a private hosting company too. If a free email service is hacked or their servers go down, you can’t guarantee that email attachments and past conversations won’t be lost. If there are important attachments that you don’t have stored anywhere else, that leaves you in a tricky position. With a professional email address, you have control over your backups so you can make sure that things are recoverable in the event of a technical issue or a cyberattack.
You Get Better Results From Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a great tool for all businesses, but it won’t be effective if you are using a generic email account to send marketing materials. All of the benefits listed above feed into your email marketing campaign by lending you getting you past the spam filters, giving you more authority, building trust, and strengthening your brand. Ultimately, this means that your marketing campaigns will get better results when you use a branded email address.
A lot of time and money goes into building an email list for your marketing campaigns. If you then start contacting those leads using a free email account, all of your hard work and your money is wasted.
How Do You Get A Branded Email Address?
If you don’t already have one, you are probably wondering how you get a unique, professional email address. With a domain name and web hosting, you can create your own branded email addresses, get started today to reap the rewards of your own professional email address.
If you already have a business website up and running, you already have the domain name and web hosting that you need, so you just need to find an email service. But if you don’t have your website yet, the first step is to find a reliable registrar for your domain name, who can also provide web hosting services. At Unlimited Web Hosting, we can supply you with an affordable domain name and web hosting package, with no hidden fees or nasty surprises when you come to renew your policy.
Once you have a dedicated domain name, you need to find an email service for your business. It’s important to consider your needs and some of the extra features that you are likely to need. For example, most businesses will benefit from mobile optimisation because the majority of people will access their work emails on their phone sometimes.
Good analytics features are also incredibly useful if you want to track your email marketing campaigns. By digging deep into the analytics, you can then adjust your strategy and optimise it, so you get better results. Not all email providers give you analytics features as standard, so check this beforehand.
Templates and automation tools are also very useful time-savers for businesses. Sending emails manually can take up a huge portion of your day, so being able to set up a workflow and then leave it is a huge bonus.
Make sure that you consider the cost of the service too because you need to manage your budget properly, especially if you are a new startup. A branded email address can benefit you in a lot of ways, but those benefits are negated if you spend too much money on it.
Finally, you need to look into their customer support offerings. If there is an issue with your business email address, that can have disastrous effects for you. So, you need to work with a provider that has an excellent support team on hand to get things up and running for you again.
Finding the right branded email address to compliment your domain name makes your business look more professional and ultimately improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
If you need more advice or you would like to know more about web hosting and domain names, get in touch with Unlimited Web Hosting today!
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About The Author
Lee is a Website Developer at Unlimited Web Hosting UK Limited.