Small Business Success: Why A Branded Email Address Matters
An email address is one of the easier things to get set up online for your business. Gmail, Yahoo, and other services make it quick and easy to start a new account - and, best of all, it’s free! However, is that the best move for your business?
Branding Your Business
Your email address is one of those things that immediately brands your business. In our digital age, it’s the main tool for communication with your customers and prospects. Your business email address is an important first impression and immediately sets the bar for what people can expect from you and your business.
The Professional Touch
An email that ends in @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or any of the other free options out there, just lacks the professional touch. It helps somewhat if that email address includes your business name, but still. Professionalism matters, especially in a time when customers are holding onto their dollars a little tighter than in the past.
Business and Personal
Another advantage is the fact that you are keeping your business and personal communications separate. More often than we’d think, our team finds businesses using personal email addresses on their website. This is not only highly unprofessional, but is just asking for important communication to be lost in the void. It’s easy to miss emails when they’re mixed in with spam, promo emails, personal notes, and everything else we all have clogging our personal inboxes.
Setting Up A Branded Email Address
So how hard is it to get a branded email address?
Fortunately, there are plenty of great options for branded email addresses. We are big fans of Google Workspace, which not only makes it incredibly easy to set up and start using but is also powered by Gmail. This means that your emails are significantly less likely to be flagged as spam for no reason (unless there actually is a reason it should be!) and the entire infrastructure is very reliable.
Another advantage of Google Workspace is their great suite of productivity tools. Google Drive and its associated apps are a wonderful tool for organizing files, creating content, and running your business. Easily accessed from anywhere and on all devices, we use it a lot ourselves.
Most web hosts offer some sort of branded email set up that’s custom to your domain. This is generally easy to set up and is often offered through Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and other web mail programs.
It’s well worth the time, effort and money to set up a professional branded email address. The benefits are immediate and important. Not sure how to do it, or simply don’t have the time? Let us help!