A great way to look more credible to potential customers is by having a business branded email address. A domain email address is one that uses your own business name, as opposed to the email providers. For example:
• laura.t@yola.com is a branded domain email address
• laura.t@gmail.com is a generic free email provider address
The first step to getting a business email address is securing your custom domain name (if you haven’t already). Once you’ve done so, you can set up a business email address that matches your domain name, which will make your online business look more professional to leads and customers. Your new branded email address will match your domain name – for example, our domain is www.yola.com, making our company email addresses are @yola.com.
Once you have a domain email address, what comes next? Here are three ideas to get the most from your new branded email address:
1. Set up email forwarding and aliases
If you have switched email providers, email forwarding will help you receive emails that were sent to your old email address. How to setup email forwarding will depend on your previous email provider. Email forwarding also comes in handy if you have multiple email addresses and would like to manage them from the same account, or if you would like to view your business email within the same email client as your personal inbox.
Email forwarding is also used when creating email aliases. An email alias, such as orders@yourname.com helps to make your company appear larger to customers, while providing clarity to customers when they communicate with you. To give an example, if a customer emails orders@yourname.com with a query about the order they placed, they know they are emailing the correct place purely from the email address. If multiple aliases are set up, it will appear to a customer that they are multiple email addresses but in actual fact they will all route to the same single mailbox, making emails easier to manage.
If you would like to connect Yola Mail to a specific email client or set up aliases, check out this handy tutorial which will gives instructions.
2. Create email groups
Setting up email groups help to route emails to different people in your business. This is a great way to manage business email effectively, as it means email can be viewed by multiple stakeholders who have an interest in the email subject. An example of an email group could be press@yourname.com. Not everyone in your organization may be interested or need to be alerted about press enquiries, likewise they shouldn’t just be send to one individual, so a group can be created where multiple people receive emails to that address.
Groups also come in useful if your business has multiple locations. For example at Yola we have offices in Cape Town and San Francisco and we have email groups set up for both of these locations. This means we can email everyone in either of those offices via a single email address, making communication simple.
3. Start email marketing
The next thing to do once you have your business email address set up is to start email marketing. Using a company branded email address to send marketing emails from will look much more professional than emailing from a generic free address. Imagine if you receive a marketing email from janedoe@gmail.com, you’ll most likely think the email is spam as the company name is not visible. However, if you received one from janedoe@businessname.com and you recognized that business name because you have placed an order with them previously, then you’re more likely to open the email and not mark it as spam.
Getting started with email marketing is pretty straightforward. We take you through seven steps to launching your first campaign in this post. Once you’re up and running there are loads of different campaigns you can run, here are a few ideas:
- Monthly newsletters – Showcasing new products/features and announcing company news.
- Promotional emails – Offering incentives to purchase, money-off coupons and limited time sales.
- Lifecycle campaigns – Automated campaigns triggered depending on a customer’s lifecycle. A few examples could be a Welcome Series after they have joined your email list, or a re-activation series if a subscriber has been dormant for a certain period of time.
As well as marketing emails, you can use your domain email address when sending transactional emails. These are emails such as order confirmations, renewal notices, password reset email or any emails to do with your account or as a result of a transaction. Sending these types of email from a branded company email address will make you look more professional and instill confidence in customers.
An email address that matches your domain name will really help the credibility of your business. If you haven’t got one already, check out Yola Mail which offers a single mailbox with unlimited mailboxes for only $9.96/year.