4 good reasons to have a business email address
Are you still using an email address with a generic email provider, such as @gmail.com for work and not your own business email address with your business name on it?
There are good reasons you should have a professional email address using your own domain. As a professional self or corporate entity, you need to have email addresses that have your business name in them.
Let’s say your hypothetical business is Company X. Ideally, your email should be in a format that looks like [email protected]. In this post, I will explain four vital reasons why is important.
In nutshell, the benefits come in four C’s; Credibility, Corporate ethics, Consistency and Control. Let’s discuss this in a bit more detail.
1. Credibility
It starts with your own domain, such as companyx.com. Using your own domain makes you a credible contact of the entity you represent. The recipients of your email will trust the message you communicate to them. This is crucial when sending messages with financial or contractual content.
I bet it will be hard to believe if [email protected] and [email protected] said they represented company X. Even if that’s true, I may have second thoughts about communicating with them over Company X matters.
Email credibility also keeps scammers at bay. Any scammer who wants to scam a customer of Company X would find it less easy to use an email with the @companyx.com domain.
Your credibility online is one of the main reasons why you need a business email address.
2. Corporate ethics
Nowadays, corporate entities ensure they have at least a domain with their emails tied to it. It is part of business ethics that any genuine entity needs to have this.
Nevertheless, there are entities that are still using generic email providers for work. While it works, it is not a good indication of an organized corporate entity.
Therefore, it is an expectation that any corporate entity must have business email addresses that use their own domain. It just seems professional.
3. Consistency
Consistency is basically the format of the email. For example, emails are formatted as [email protected] or [email protected].
Having all employees with a similar format in their business email addresses displays consistency. This is crucial when representing your corporate entity to the public.
In addition, having consistency in the format of business email addresses may help clients correctly guess an email address. They just need to know the full name of their person of interest.
This consistency helps with the branding aspects of an entity as well.
4. Control
When you have your own business email system, you have all the legal control over the contents of your entity’s email.
All the email contents of staff in a corporate entity by default belong to the entity. This means all the data that passes through the corporate email system somewhat falls under its jurisdiction.
It is only fair that the entity must have control over the data in all mailboxes. Staff who uses a particular email do not legally own the contents of their email addresses.
Whenever a staff leaves the company, any new replacement can easily pick up communications where the predecessor left.
In-house email access policies and guidelines will help govern how staff use the company email addresses.
How to?
To have your own business email address, you need to have a domain name & email hosting provider.
If you’ve already had a domain from your website, you can use that. Otherwise, you need to register one with a domain registrar. [To have a .SB domain as an entity in the Solomon Islands, you need to register it with Our Telekom].
Next, you will need to acquire an email hosting provider to host your email server. I recommend Zoho.
In the next post, I will write more in detail about how to implement your own email system. But to conclude, as a professional entity, having a business email with your own domain is important to note.