A number of web hosting providers like Certa provide the facility to host your email
address. For a small business owner, it may seem not very important or unnecessary
since it’s a lot easier to use your Gmail or Outlook email address instead. Here are
some of the reasons why you should consider changing your business email address.

First impressions

Free email services are good for personal use however, they may come across as
unprofessional for business uses. A branded email shows the world your company is
established and professional. A generic email may make your company come across
as inexperienced – or raise doubts on whether you’re a real company at all. When
you use a branded email, it shows your customers/clients serious about your business.

Promote Brand Awareness

The best benefit of using branded email is every time you send out an email, you’re
promoting your business, not Gmail or Hotmail. It’s a valuable, cost-efficient way to
market your company without having to spend a lot of money. If you, like many
other small businesses, think that branding was only meant for large enterprises with
big advertising budgets, think again. You’re never too small to start building your
brand, and you can get started today with branding your email.

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A generic email address can show your business is new, or small, or part time.
Having a branded email creates a more “corporate image” and can help prevent
awkward situations where potential clients may not take you seriously. Additionally,
setting up multiple email addresses for different parts of your business will support
that established, professional image you need like:

  • billing@yourbusiness.com
  • info@yourbusiness.com,
  • support@yourbusiness.com,

Typos are quite common and lead to missed opportunities since your customer
might end up emailing an address that does not belong to you. You should double
or triple check your email address on products, especially business cards, posters
and other offline channels.

Credibility and Trust

Scammers or hackers are out there and wanting to get as many peoples personal
information as possible. This means many consumers are not comfortable
emailing personal information to a nonprofessional email address like
mikesbiz88@gmail.com. When you have a branded email address, you’re
providing a sense of security and reassurance to your customers that your
business is legitimate. You should associate the name of your business to your
professional email address this adds interest to potential clients.
Can you just imagine receiving an email from sarah4p99@yahoo.com instead
of sarah@yourbusiness.com? The chances are it will remain unopened or
ignored because it is not a trusted email address. Your professional email
address can be an easy recognition of your company. Customers will also start
to remember the name of your business which builds brand awareness and
trust.

Control

Having your own custom business email address gives you control and
organises your system. You can easily create email addresses for new
employees in your company and gives you the convenience of monitoring the
inactive ones. For example, if your business has 20 employees instead of having
generic email addresses like info, accounts, shop etc. You can have personalised
emails for employees to contact clients, this makes your company not only look
professional but show there are real people behind the scenes.

Catch-all emails

Typos in email addresses are a lot more common than expected. An email
hosting service with the catch-all feature enabled ensures that even email addresses
that were not marked to the intended recipient get delivered to the admin or
any other designated user. This way, no inbound inquiry is lost in transit.

Storage

You should make sure you have sufficient storage space. As a business, you do
not want to lose past messages or documentation records with your customers.
This is necessary from both a marketing and legal perspective. Pick an email
the host that provides storage and backup facilities that suit your requirements.

Security

Security is very important, and you should pick a hosting service that takes email security
seriously. The most established form of security is TLS (Transport Layer Security)
which is used by common email hosting providers. TLS encrypts the data that is
transmitted between the email server and the client and prevents intrusion from
any third party users. Other forms of security include Bitmessage, PGP (Pretty
Good Privacy), OpenPGP, GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and S/MIME.

Spam Filter

While catch-all email addresses make sure that all inbound inquiries are attended
to, they also lead to excessive spam. Unsolicited emails clutter your inbox, take
up unnecessary storage space and drastically bring down the productivity of
your team. An effective spam filter makes sure that all unsolicited emails are
caught before it reaches the inbox of your users.
Addressing A Professional Email – How To

IMAP & POP

The POP protocol lets you download the email from the remote server to your
local device. This is one-way transmission which means that if your users access
their email from multiple devices like their laptop, smartphone and tablet, their
actions from one device does not impact the experience on the other device. You
are required to mark emails as read or delete them separately on each of your
devices.
IMAP is a two-way communication and stores the actions taken from one device
(like your laptop) on the remote server. This synchronises your experience across
various devices. If you have a business email that is shared by various employees
(support email, for example), it is important to pick a host with IMAP facility lest
you have the same email responded to by multiple users from your team.

Inexpensive and Easy

You can set up a branded email address with minimal effort at a reasonably low
cost. The great advantage of registering a domain name now is how it can grow
with your business – use it for your branded email today and for your website in
the future. From only £8.39 p/m inc. VAT you can have access to your professional
premium email with 3 mailboxes, 1GB storage. Or if you are looking for Exchange
email, it starts from £12.00 p/m inc. VAT with 50GB mail box size. All include
anti-spam and virus filtering, webmail, Pop 3 & IMAP, catch all email, auto
responders and more features.

Collaborate with your team

Professional email addresses powered by solutions like Office365 typically come
bundled with other features like shared calendars which make collaborating with
your colleagues much easier. You can send and manage meeting requests, view your
workmate’s calendars and check their availability, and even hold virtual meetings
and work on shared documents at the same time using these kinds of tools.
While on the surface you might appear to be saving money by using a free email
address for your business, you’ll often find it’s costing you dearly in other ways
like consumer confidence, your business’s credibility, and even in productivity.
Professional email solutions through Office365 are available from £5.99 for
essentials, £9.59 for business or £11.99 for business premium. (All prices are
per month and including VAT). These all include SharePoint and OneDrive
Storage, choice of mailboxes, online apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint,
email storage and shared email, calendars, contacts and tasks.

Addressing A Professional Email – How To
Using a professional email hosting service gives you peace of mind. You are
able to focus on your business while the email hosting provider manages
your email service.
Most email hosting providers offer a great set of webmail features include:

  • Unlimited aliases,
  • Unlimited Forwarders,
  • Autoresponders,
  • Large attachments,
  • spam/virus protection,
  • Mail rules,
  • IMAP/POP3,
  • Online storage,
  • Calendars,
  • Mailing lists,
  • Whitelists & Blacklists,
  • Backups,
  • Archiving,
  • Folder management,
  • Contacts management, etc.

You are able to access your email from anywhere using webmail.
Professional email hosting service is very affordable and eliminates the
need for in-house email servers and IT people to manage those email servers.