Are you using a free email account to send email to clients and advertisers? You could be damaging your credibility and missing out on potential marketing opportunities.

Using Gmail seems like a benign decision at first; it syncs to all sorts of services, it doubles as a login for a lot of social media, it’s simple to set up, AND it’s free. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

But that very thought process is a problem itself. Because those emails are free, they can be created by anyone. And therefore, clients may not recognize joe.smith@gmail.com as the same Joe Smith they order office supplies from. They may even think you’re a spammer.

If you send a lot of sales emails, especially cold emails, writing from a generic email address may raise issues about your legitimacy or professionalism. If you’re such a big shot, why don’t you have a proper email address?

Finally, your emails might not even make it to the people you are trying to reach because THEIR company email service might be filtering it out. Lots of places filter free email addresses because they are likely to be spam.

How A Business Email Will Benefit You

Now that we’ve scared you a little, let’s talk about the benefits to a formal company email address.

• Legitimacy. We mentioned this in the first section, but it bears repeating. J.Smith@ProOfficeSupplies.com seems more trustworthy because that’s the same domain as the company website. Therefore, Joe is not a scammer. Therefore, we will order 1000 widgets from Joe.
• Security. Cloud-based email is notoriously vulnerable, and free services in particular suffer from a plague of hackers seeking to exploit these vulnerabilities. Enterprise emails, whether desktop-based or not, typically have several additional layers of security.
• Free marketing. When you are writing from a company email, not only is your company website right there in the “from” field, you can also take advantage of personalized email “stationery” that is available in most enterprise email applications.
• Ease of use. It’s a little bit more complicated to set up a business email address, but once it’s in place, it’s just as easy to use as your old email address. And you don’t have to worry about having to log in to multiple accounts. If you want to, you can forward your personal email to your new inbox.

Have we convinced you to make the leap yet? If you have a company website, a company email address is simple to set up. You’ll be glad you did.

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