Many people set up a business email address through their Internet Service Provider rather than their domain name. This is a mistake.

Don't make a basic business mistake

Do you have any of the following types of email address for your business?

• yourbusiness@shaw.ca
• yourbusiness@att.net
• yourbusiness@telus.com
• yourbusiness@hotmail.com
• yourbusiness@yahoo.com

If you answered, “Yes” to any of these, you have made a strategic error which can be corrected. Why promote the service provider when you should be promoting your business? Where is the address of your website, the key ingredient of your Internet cake? Why are you hiding the website’s address?

An Example

Let’s use ABC Designs as our example company.

You have 2 options for an email address:

1. creative@abcdesigns.com
2. abcdesigns@shaw.ca (a local Internet Service Provider)

The first one not only contains your website address but has a branding or service associated with it. You could also have info@abcdesigns, paul@abcdesigns.com, support@abcdesigns.com, and allocate each address to a separate employee. The “service@” piece projects a feeling of professionalism to the recipient and confirms that they are dealing with the right department or person.

The same company that is hosting your website maintains your email address mailboxes and provides an ability (POP accounts are standard) to check them in an email client such as Outlook or Apple Mail. They also take care of spam filtering and making sure your email is backed up on their server. All included in your monthly hosting cost.

If you use Outlook, you can connect your email to your calendar, notes, projects and other tools, all in one place. You can share tasks with other employees and streamline your business branding.

Yes, you CAN pay extra to make your free email a POP one but why pay more when you have already paid for your web hosting?

And here’s the kicker. The email addresses stay with you as long as you pay for your domain name.

The second one? Let me ask you some simple questions.

If you are using a webmail service to check it (you log in at a web page; they host the email on their server), what happens if you switch to Telus or AT&T, for example?

What happens if the ISP of free email provider (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo!) is taken over and your email becomes newhotmail.com for example? You’ve had 1000s of business cards printed with the old email address!

What happens if you start to use a new way to email. e.g. facebook.com email?

That’s right. It’s goodbye email. All gone, maybe years of email communication.

Secondly, why only have one email address for your whole company? Would you set up:

• abcdesigns-info@shaw.ca
• abcdesigns-creative@shaw.ca
• abcdesigns-billing@shaw.ca

Of course not, that would be silly.

Conclusion

Take the time to learn how to set up email addresses on your domain name. Check the HELP section of your web host to learn how to set up and check them in an email client such as Outlook or Apple Mail.

Make sure it is correctly configured with Name (don’t use all lower case), Reply-To email, signature file and other important settings that are key in your online presentation.

You don’t have much time to brand when you send an email. Better make those seconds count!