If you have a business and you are using Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo or any other mass market free email provider then you should read on. You may be starting a new business and having a new website, you should also add creating a custom email address to your to-do list.
Generic addresses scream unprofessional
You may already have a personal address that is @gmail, @yahoo, @btconnect, @hotmail and think that these free accounts work perfectly well. Using free email addresses detracts from the value that you want to offer your customers. If you are not convinced, consider this; would you feel more confident working with danni113@gmail.com OR support@tst.uk.com
Potential customers are too busy to work out why you didn’t opt for the nominal cost of a custom email address to actually buy from you. As your competitors all use custom email addresses, that might be a factor that sends business elsewhere. You are right to think that an email address shouldn’t affect your credibility. Your products and service should speak for themselves but on some level your email address transmits the kind of business that you run.
Make sure the impression that potential customers get of your brand isn’t affected by a free email address.
When someone leaves, you keep control
If an employee uses a personal email address to conduct business on your behalf, when they leave so does access to all of those customer communications. On the other hand, if you set up an email account under their name, you can either forward the emails or change the account name to the new employee. You choose what happens to the emails, not someone else.
Branded email does your marketing for you
Have you ever seen someone’s email address on a business card and looked up the website because you wanted to check them out? With a free email address, this just wouldn’t happen. If you are using your domain in your email address, you’re getting your brand in front of more eyes.
The email address should appear in every employee’s email signature and any printed marketing materials. Every place that you place the branded email address is one more chance to attract new business.
You can standardise email addresses
With a custom email address you can use a standard format for all email addresses. This provides consistency that customers can easily predict and therefore, are more likely to contact you. When you use a free email account, you are at the mercy of whatever usernames are still available.
Better support
A free email account has free support which is heavily used. The volume of users compared to the resource that organisations can put in for a free service inevitably results in slow responses to requests for help. When your business relies on email communication, waiting days for a fix can be costly.
Our Zimbra premium email service has 100% email delivery guarantee and 99.9% uptime. We are on hand to respond to any calls for help and usually resolve any issues within a matter of minutes. Our Knowledgebase provides valuable guides and self help information specifically about our services.
We will migrate your emails for you to our premium Zimbra email services and remotely access your computer(s) to set them up for you.
Secure and GDPR compliant
Yahoo, Gmail and hotmail have all been hacked in the past. This means there is a high chance that your email data has been compromised if you have a free email account.
Free email providers store data on servers that are often overseas and governed by less stringent privacy laws than in the UK. Some email providers, include in their T’s&C’s the right to access your emails and use the data in them to target marketing to you.
We use SSL to encrypt your communications with the services and our email servers use TLS for communicating with third parties on our premium email service. All backup data is encrypted before it is transferred to separate backup storage locations. Our two UK data centre are ISO 27001 accredited, Tier III. In short, we have the highest level of security and reliability.
Get in touch to set up your branded, secure email today (01244) 457870.
