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Using Email Addresses
By admin | December 15, 2008
There are many businesses that use free email services such as hotmail, yahoo or sympatico.ca, and those email addresses appear on the people’s business cards, letterhead and company literature. Free email services like these are better than nothing, but you would appear to be much more reputable if your email address ends in yourowndomain.com.
So if you had already registered a domain name as suggested in a previous post, then you could set up as many email addresses on it as you need. You could have one for each member of your staff, or one address specifically to receive general enquiries or create one for the sales department. You could also have one just for your tech department or whatever you need. Your options are much greater when you own your own domain and you will look that much more professional in the eyes of your customers.
For example, you may see someone’s email address on a business card that says joesplumbing (at) hotmail.com. But if his email address were sales (at) joesplumbing.com then he would seem to be more professional even if he was really a carpenter and not even a plumber at all. The point is that in the eyes of your potential customer, you will be seen as more professional, reliable and stable once they notice your email address. And they haven’t even been to your site yet.
One of the features with all hosting plans is a certain number of email address that you can have, and they almost always include way more than you will ever need. Some hosting plans will allow you 10 email address and some plans give you an unlimited amount. Choose a hosting plan that will allow you to go in and create your own as you need them, rather than having to ask your host to create them. You will also be able to create autoresponders, and this is something that will return to the sender a pre-made message of your choosing if you wanted to.
You could say, for example, send an email to such and such an address for more information. And then it will automatically send the people back an email with that info. In that email you could include links to any page(s) on your website, or whatever you want. In some cases this could help you to cut back on the amount of work that someone in your company does just by answering commonly asked questions.
Another feature of email accounts on your own domain name is that you can choose your passwords or set one of your addresses as the default email that will catch all the emails sent to your domain in case anyone mispells something. You could also have a copy of every email received by any address on your domain sent to another address of your choosing without the other person even knowing… if you wanted to. Some people do like to spy on their fellow employees, and that’s a pretty easy way to do it right there. Do not respond and never accidentally click on that “confirm email received” box or else your cover will be blown.
You will still be able to send and receive your email by using either a web-based page or in Outlook Express, whichever you are using now.
In short, using an email address for your company that is on your own domain as opposed to using a free service will make you look much more professional and will also give you alot more options as well.
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