How Your Email Address Could Be a Deal Breaker
Every digital part of your business helps to tell its story. That's true even for your email address. Branded emails are more important than you may think. For us, if you don't have one, it may be a deal breaker.
You may be wondering how your email address could be a deal breaker. There are more than a handful of articles about what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for where email addresses and new hires are concerned. But let’s talk about what business-to-business providers are looking for. And what your potential customers are expecting.
What If Your Business is Just Getting Started?
If you’re a new small business, getting all of your ducks in a row is a lengthy process. One of the first things you might do is quickly create an email address. You may even go to Gmail to create a new personal account, or maybe you use the email you currently have.
We get it. Business has to keep moving forward and there are things to do. Email is a big part of that.
If your email address is something like ‘bobsmith@gmail.com’, it will suffice while you get up and running. We know you have bigger plans. Changing to a branded email will benefit your business. Don’t wait too long to change it.
Established and Still Using Your @Gmail Account?
If you’ve been in business for a bit or you want to project professionalism right out of the gate, it’s time for a professional email address. A professional email address is one that ends with your business name. They are also referred to as ‘branded emails’. For example, our email address is info@studiobarncreative.com. The email is connected to your domain name. And getting the two in sync is something you’ll want to do… for your business.
So How Could My Email Address Be a Deal Breaker?
Here at Studio Barn Creative, each week we receive dozens of emails from companies trying to sell or educate us about something. For the most part, we do our best to read all of our email. We appreciate the effort, and acknowledge the prep time that went in to preparing it for us to read. And ultimately, we delete many of our emails for various reasons. Maybe you can relate.
Occasionally, however, we will ‘star’ an email with the intention of revisiting it. It may have an idea or a service we want to consider integrating into our business model. The tech world always has something new, fun, and with added value to offer a business like ours.
What Impression is Your Email Address Making?
But here’s where your email can be a deal breaker. When we get an email with an introduction that catches our attention and offers a service we are interested in our next step is always to look at the originating email address. If it’s from @hotmail.com or @gmail.com or @outlook.com (or something similar), we don’t take the time to finish reading it and immediately delete it.
This may seem harsh. However, these types of email addresses tell us all that we need to know in a split second. That the senders aren’t serious about their business.
And while that may not be true all of the time, perception is reality.
And therefore, when we see these types of emails we quickly think things like:
- How can a company offering to sell us web based services possibly have experience if they don’t have an associated domain name and website?
- How can I really take ‘bob@hotmail.com’ seriously if he isn’t taking his own business seriously enough to get a professional email address?
- If he isn’t making an effort for his business, what kind of effort could he possibly make for ours?
Generic email addresses tend to convey that a business is small, new, inexperienced, or part-time. Or, even worse, make us wonder if the email is a scam.
Branded Email: Small Investment with a Big Return
A professional email is probably one of the smallest financial investments that you can make for your business with the biggest impact comparatively. The return on investment is something we’d even go out on a limb to categorize as a ‘sure thing’.
GSuite, an email product offered by Google, makes it fairly simple to create your own branded email for only $6/month. As your company grows, adding new users can be completed in minutes.
Ask yourself, could you be losing potential customers because of the email address that you’re using to communicate with them?
We want to want to read your email.
Some Random Email Facts
Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. The format for defining how a message should be transmitted was first standardized in 1977. Now, more than 600 million people internationally use email.
Some of these users are email marketers. According to a study published in 2015, email (for Brands) has an average return on investment of $38 for each $1 spent.