Your Own Email Address Increases Credibility
When starting a business everyone knows that you need to spend money on a few things. Letterheads, logo, business cards and a website should all be part of your marketing strategy. Many businesses who don’t have a website choose to use the email provided by their ISP such a gmail, hotmail, shaw or telus.
The fact of the matter is crondeau567@telus.net or candy@gmail.com doesn’t look very professional when printed on a business card.
Your business success is based on three things, visibility, credibility and relationships. Credibility won’t be achieved when using a hotmail address. People need to know that you are serious about business and this can be said by getting your own domain name. A common myth is that to get a domain name, you need to have a website. This isn’t true. Although having a website will give you even more credibility, this is a topic for another article.
If you are not ready to fully develop a website, you can simply register your domain name and use the call forwarding feature. Getting your domain name is easy and shouldn’t cost you more than $50/year. I recommend Doteasy.com to most of my clients. Their registration system is easy to use, they can provide you with various website extensions including .ca and their email forwarding tool is fast and easy to use.
Once you have your own domain name, you may also want to create several different emails, such as careers@, sales@, info@ etc… These can also be forwarded to different email addresses. Once this is set up, you will need to set up your “reply to” email in Outlook or other email tool that you are using and you can start building credibility.