You’ve Got Mail…or Not

Email communication is sometimes the lifeblood of a Solopreneur’s business. But what is the statement that email address you use makes?

There are a few approaches to business email. First, you can use what many of us use for our personal email, a free email address. To name a few, we have seen them on Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, among others. It is clearly the most cost effective method of choosing a business email, yet it may not be the most professional. It does make a statement, you were not willing to pay for a separate email that brands back to your website, something to consider.

The dog pool business I owned utilized one of the free emails. Often, those emails were sent with an ad, unrelated to our business, which was attached to the end. The ‘price’ we and our customers paid for not having a dedicated professional email. So, we were advertising for something or someone else. Not ideal.

The second option, and the one we chose when creating our consulting business, is to have a website/domain related email. Your email address will have the same domain address as your website. In our case, our website is illuminatebc.com and our email is the person’s name@illuminatebc.com. It brands the email address back to our company website. It makes a professional statement. Our brand is then also in our email address, every single time we send out a communication. Every time we send an email it is a marketing opportunity to continually brand our identity, a worthwhile trade-off for the cost of the self-identifying email, in our opinion.

Consider your options and choose the best path for your company. But, remember, a free email address makes a statement. Is that the statement your brand wants to make?

Be well.