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For business websites it is all too common to see many business owners not using their domain name for their email address. What I mean by this isinstead of using an email address such as yourbusiness@yahoo.com you should be using yourname@yourbusiness.co.uk.  There are a few reasons for doing this and it is very easy to do.

It stops your business looking unprofessional

I worded that carefully, I could have said “it makes your business look professional”, but by using your domain name as your email address, it puts you where you should be. Nowadays we expect a business, whether a small business or large one, to use a professional email address. This is just a general standard that tell the person thinking of emailing you, that your email address is a legitimate one because the email address is the same as the website domain that they have visited.

It builds trust with potential customers.

On the internet trust is everything. We give out our bank details and giving out our email address to you is no different. We want some assurance that when we email you, we can guarantee that there is somebody that can be traced to your website that is answering our email. A Yahoo, Google, MSN, Aol, etc email address can be set up by anybody with no accountability for whatever actions they plan to use their email for. Which brings me neatly on to…..

Scammers and Spammers us Googlemail, Yahoo and MSN.

Any time you get an email from a rich business man needing you to invest some money in order for you to release funds in Nigeria, of which you will receive a lot of money for helping out. You know those emails with lots of spelling errors and capital letters that call you SIR, even if you are a woman. They are usually sent from a Yahoo, MSN or Googlemail account. This is because they are nearly always impossible to trace so are ideal to use for criminal activity. So over the past few years especially, as what is known as the 419 scam has become rife, people associate these email addresses with scammers out to rob you of your money.

So with trust being a big deal on the internet, using an email address like that for your business is putting you a step behind your competition who are using their domain name for their email address.

It can make your business look bigger than it is.

No large business uses email addresses that end with @yahoo.com etc. And no matter what size your business is, even for the smallest business, you should use the email address as a uniform with your website. But if you are a small business wanting to look bigger, or organise your emails into easy to manage folders, using multiple “departments” such as sales@, info@ or customerservices@ will give people the impression that you have a number of different departments to deal with certain enquiries. This way you could be sat working at home and appear to have a large corporate office.

How do I set up my email to do this?

There is two ways, one is to see if your hosting, or your domain name provider has a mailbox facility, most should. You can set up multiple email addresses, including email addresses for your staff. If you are a novice, you can simply log into your mailbox through that website, or you can set up Windows Mail to receive them straight to your desktop.When you reply, it will usually auto-select the corresponding email address to use to reply. There is usually instructions on how to do this, or your web design company should be able to set this up on your behalf.

The other way is to simply use a forwarding email address. By this I mean you create the email addresses you want, as described above and then set them to forward to your @yahoo.com email address. Beware though, this can lead to you sending a reply using your @yahoo.com or whatever email address when you reply, not ideal but it beats advertising an email address such as that in the first place.