As a business owner, you should know how important email is. Despite the abundance of social media platforms, chat, and zoom, it is still the number one method for communication between a business and its customers. To a customer, knowing a business’ email address can be the difference between making a sale or getting a bad review. In addition, businesses use emails to communicate to one another, both within the organisation and to customers. Using a professional business email address is one of the best and easiest way to help your business to succeed.

6 Reasons You Need A Custom Email Address

1. @Gmail, @Yahoo or @"insert free email address here" just shouts ‘Unprofessional!' to your customers

If your argument against a custom email address is that Gmail and Yahoo provide perfectly good free ones, consider this: if you were thinking about spending a fair amount of money with a company, which salesperson email would you feel more confident with: joebloggs23@gmail.com -Or- sales@mybusiness.com?

Using free email addresses detracts from the value you want to offer your customers. They're too busy trying to work out why you can't afford the minimal cost of a custom email address to actually buy from you. Will your company still be around to service their needs after the sale if you can't even afford email? Worse still, if your competitors all use custom email addresses, a customer may well take their business down the road. Yes you're saving money with a free email address, but how much is it costing you?

If you're thinking that an email address shouldn't validate your credibility maybe you're right, but it does. Don't spoil the impression that potential customers get of your brand by using a free email address.

2. You Can Standardise Email Addresses

This is especially important as you grow your staff: when you have your own custom email address , you can use a standard format for all your company email addresses. This provides consistency in your business, and customers can easily remember the formula for your company email addresses.

When you use free emails, you're at the mercy of whatever usernames are still available. If your name is Peter Chan, good luck getting that email without adding all kinds of characters and numbers to the address, like peter_chan_888@hotmail.com

Here are some examples of employee email styles you could use:

• john@businessname.com
  
• john.smith@businessname.com
  
• john.s@cs.businessname.com
  
• john@itgo.businessname.com
  
• john@mail-businessname.com

You can use your employee email addresses for corporate communications, training, and procedural information as well. If employees use different email services to communicate with you, then it will not be traceable. You can track and store messages in your email inbox if you use business email accounts.

3. When Someone Leaves Your Company, You Keep Control

What happens when your marketing manager leaves, taking her personal email with her? If she was using it to conduct business for your organisation, you won't be able to access those emails.

On the other hand, if you set up an account under her name, you can redirect those emails to go to your newly hired marketing manager. Or, you could create a generic email for certain roles, like marketingmanager@mybusiness.com so that the new hire just takes over management of that account. They would just need to change the display name to their own.

4. A Branded Email Does Your Marketing For You

A business email address is like a calling card. After setting up an account and using it to send business communications, you will notice a better response from clients and customers who recognise your brand name in the email address.

Have you ever seen someone's email address on a business card and looked up the website because you were curious? That doesn't happen with free email addresses. But, if you use your domain within your website, you're getting your brand in front of more eyeballs.

Your business email address should appear in each employee's email signature, as well as on business cards and marketing materials. Every place you have that branded email address is one more opportunity to attract new business!

Is it an email address you can trust? Business email addresses denote a registration, safety measures, and professional responsibility that just are not present with a free email address.

5. It helps internal and external communication

Business email promotes communication between your customers and different teams. For example, you can set up a support@ahumkadigital.com to send emails to the customer service team.

Sales teams need custom business email domains because B2B communications almost require it. You will not get a response to an unverified public email address domain like Yahoo.com or Aol.com.

6. You Can Create as Many Emails as You Want

Even if you're a sole operator, you can create emails for different purposes like sales, customer service, orders, etc. This can give the impression that your company is larger than it is (which is not a bad thing), and in the event that one day you hire for those roles, you can simply assign those email addresses to other employees.

Creating Your Custom Professional Email is easy

Of course we think the easiest way to get a professional email setup is to go to the Ahumka Digital store and select an email product. If you choose not to do that however, there are other ways for you to set up your professional email. Here are two of the most popular:

1. Most Popular Use

Your own domain and host through Zoho or other free email platform like Gmail, Greatmail, etc. Make sure you sign up for their professional services so you use your domain, NOT the free @zoho, @gmail etc domain.

2. Easy for Beginners 

Purchase web hosting with free business email through either your domain hosting provider, or others such as Godaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost etc.

What to look for in an email hosting provider

When selecting an email hosting service, you need to choose one that will offer you the best email management solutions, storage capacity, technical support, and, of course, offer you their services at an affordable price.

You may have to make manual record changes and go through a tangled nightmare in order to get your email setup. This is why you need to look for email service providers that offer customer support and reliability first. There are some basic rules when choosing a hosting provider that you want to stick to. This is a good start for anyone who is just setting up their business email for the first time as well.

Here are some of the key features you should look for:

Reliable Hosting

You should always search for a hosting provider’s uptime and make sure that it is at least 99.99 percent. This means that the hosting provider rarely fails, and it means that your server will continue to stay up so you do not have issues with failed email messages.

Spam Filters and Security

Most email service providers will offer some kind of security options like spam filters. It is important to pick an email platform that has lots of ways to set up spam filters and secure your inbox. There are also hosting providers with built-in security applications such as malware detection.

Ease of Use

If you choose a good hosting provider, it should only be a couple of clicks to create a business email and start checking your inbox.

Storage

Storage is a big issue. In some cases, if you have a mail quota, then you may limit inboxes to rather small amounts of storage. This is best if used by start-ups and small businesses that may not want to pay extra for large amounts of email storage.

Advanced Features and Applications

Most hosting providers use cPanel today to set up your server and give you access to business email. However, there are some that also provide advanced email features such as the ability to recall a sent message or schedule tasks. There are also ways to integrate a CRM with your email inbox.

Good Reputation

What do customer reviews say about the hosting provider? You can tell when a server is bad and constantly failing. Customers have no issues writing a review these days.

I hope this article has given you a good overview of why you need a business email address. If you want to get started today, go to our store and pick an email package so we can set a business email up for you. Stop using free email and move your business to another level!