Having a professional email address says a lot about how professional and how serious you are as business. We did a study the other day on what email addresses people were using for business purposes. To our surprise, there were several businesses using @yahoo.com, @gmail.com, @outlook.com, @hotmail.com as their email.
Here are the key take aways as to why you need a professional email address:
It legitimizes you as a business. When you’re doing business with someone you want to show your clients that you are serious about your business. How can clients or prospects consider your products and services if you don’t take your own business seriously? And with today’s increase in getting hacked or compromised, users are trained to look at email extensions and identify if the email is fraudulent. With that being said, not having a professional email address will most likely flag you as an email that may be fraud.
It increases your branding. Having a professional email address will brand you and your business in every inbox. You send hundreds if not thousands of emails through the life of your business. Which means the more your clients and prospects see your professional email, the more your business is embedded in their mind. Using extensions such as @yahoo.com, @gmail.com, @outlook.com, @ hotmail.com only, is branding those larger organizations and not your business.
Having a professional email address also creates security. Not just for your business but for those on the receiving end. When you have a professional email address you have security features built in. Security features that are not available with free email addresses. Meaning you are less likely to get compromised and those receiving emails from you are less likely to get hacked.
Another reason you should create a professional email address for your business is so that you have control over users and content. Say you hired on a new employee if you were to set them up with a yahoo, gmail, outlook, or hotmail account you do not have access to any of the content within the email. The user, once created, can easily go in and change the password. So, if they were to get terminated, there is no way you can cut them off from using that email address. If you created a professional email address, you would have access to the backend of the software to add/remove users, change passwords when necessary, and you have the content. You can restrict users from accessing it should they get terminated, and it’s a lot easier for you and or your I.T. team to manage the emails under one portal.
These takeaways are a start as to what you need to consider when you start a business or have had your business for quite some time. If you are still using email addresses from yahoo, gmail, outlook, hotmail, or any other extension other than your own personalized domain name contact C Three Business Consultants!