If you run a free email address as part of your business, it very well may be doing so and if not currently, can become a big risk to your business.
Free email addresses commonly are ones that end in:
@outlook.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @live.com.au
Let’s start with the best bonus for your business:
The professional look and feel.
Many businesses run on one of the free ones, but many, many more run on their own custom domain to match their website. This increase the professional image they portray to their customers while also having the benefit of adding trust to the customer when they mention their email address. Customers will tend to feel that they are using a ‘cheap’ service when they learn your email address is based one of the free ones.
You also find that if you send out invoices your invoices will not end up in spam as often as a free address, meaning more conversions and higher sales.
Do you want to build your brand or someone else’s brand?
Using a free email address will promote that service and lessen the chance your business name gets stuck in their head. Using your own custom domain will help promote your own brand and becomes a very inexpensive way to gain some basic advertising.
The risk to your business
You’ve had your business running for a while now and you have all your customers’ email addresses saved in your address book. Supplier & customer invoices are in there with a whole lot of other information critical to your business. It’s a main point of contact after all! Then one day you wake up to find your email isn’t working. No matter what you do you can’t get back in. You panic and call your I.T. contractor. Can he get your email back? Is it gone for good?
We’ve lost count of the number of businesses that have come to us wanting us to break into the email account they managed to get locked out of, this might be due to a hacking, changing the password and then forgetting it or some other reason they can’t remember the password to get back in.
Sometimes we can work some magic and get back in, but most
of the time we can’t. Often the free email addresses will require a set of
questions and/or a code sent to another email address or mobile phone number.
This, in theory, is great until you forget the name of your favourite teacher
or change mobile phone numbers and forget to update the account settings in the
email address. Now it’s too late and you are probably locked out for good.
The platform Custom email address run on are often more secure than a free
account as well, ensuring you have less chance of your email being compromised.
Examples
Have a look at these examples and think for yourself what
one looks better.
(all emails are made up for
example purposes only)
Joeswindowcleaning5587@gmail.com
or Joe@joeswindowcleaning.com.au
thelocaltileshop@outlook.com or sales@localtiles.com.au
mygiftsandjellery85@hotmail.com or precious@giftsandjellery.com.au
Solution
Using your custom domain for your emails avoids all the pitfalls of a free email address and allows easier recovery to your account via the host you use.
Understandable I.T recommends either Google’s G suite or Microsoft’s Office 365 with email hosting for your email accounts. We can help you work out the best platform to use for your business. Moving over usually is quick and easy as we take care of all the technical steps for you and show you how to add the accounts to your computers and phones and are always there for any support you may need.
Costs
This is the question everyone wants to know. The good news is it’s cheaper than you think. Generally, each email account you wish to use will cost you less than 2 cups of coffee per month. Hardly anything!
The only other costs are:
- a once-off set up fee (charged based on the amount of work required)
- a domain name (we can sort this for you too! Process start at $12.50/year based on the domain name extension you wish to use. )
In the long run, an email address using a custom domain can cost you less when things go wrong. A free email address could cost you your entire business.
