Why Your Business Needs Business Email
Posted: 3 February 2015 at 9:04 am | Author: Laura Morris
Admit it. You’ve seen it before. A van or car with a business advert on the side, and under the big letters proudly displaying the company name, the free email address you can send messages to. While free email has been a blessing to millions of people who need to connect with each other, using a free address (google.com, gmail.com, Hotmail.com, or any of a thousand others) is advertising ‘I have an under resourced business!’
It gets worse when you see that they have an excellent, relevant, catchy business website name – and just below it, a free email address.
Not only should you have a business email address, but if your business is big enough, you should have personalised email addresses for the different teams, employees, or departments.
To forestall the gasps of horror, here are some myth-busting facts for you!
“Business email is just too expensive!”
Not so! If you’ve got a website, chances are your hosting company offers anywhere from one, ten, or even a hundred individual email addresses ending in yourcompany.com. You may even have them free as part of your hosting package, meaning there’s no extra cost to set this up.
“It’s too complicated to check multiple email addresses!”
If you’ve got a smartphone, you can set it up to check any number of email addresses; they can even let you know if something’s arrived! If you’ve got a desktop computer, you can use programs like Outlook or Thunderbird to have all your emails come to one central folder. You can even send messages and select which address you want them to come from!
“But we don’t want to repaint all the vans/reprint all the letterhead/rebuild the website!”
Rebranding doesn’t have to be expensive. By all means, wait until you’ve used up all the old letterhead before ordering stuff with the new email address on it. Don’t want to repaint a fleet of vans? Maybe you can get a sticker to cover over the bit of the vehicle with the email address. And if your website is so complicated that you can’t change a single line of text on it, you need a new website designer!
“We’ve never needed individual business emails before!”
It’s true, if you don’t use something, you may not know you need it. How many times have you tried to hunt through ten thousand old emails, looking for that one inquiry form – the one for £5000 of work, stuck between your 5000 Facebook notifications and the email from your cousin in Kidderminster? Business and personal email should always be separate, and if you can separate your emails into categories (finance, orders, work, or whatever your specific needs are) you’ll be that much more organized when it comes to your work.
The key to a successful business is to be organized and professional – and while an email address won’t fix absolutely everything, it’s often the first impression your business has – why not make the most of it?
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