To have an online presence through a website, a blog and the different Social Networks, it usually implies having a registered domain name. Most professional businesses choose a domain name that reflects their primary business name or business likeness.
Domain names identify the business on the Internet, as well as identify the business in all back-and-forth email correspondence. Having email accounts that identify account holders as business is very professional, as well as being secure.
However, there are still a large number of businesses that continue to use “FREE” email services as their primary means of online correspondence for their customers, prospects, and employees. There’s nothing wrong with free email providers, including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, to name a few. They provide a lot of free space and many tricks that are wonderful value.
The reasons to use free email are numerous, the most important being to filter and capture spam and junk mail. Others like the free features included as well as the ease of use of these services. Google, for example, requires a Gmail account, usually linked to a Gmail email account, to use the great services they have available.
But, the biggest downside to using free email services goes back to the main reason a business went online in the first place: to gain exposure and a great way to give information and details about the respective company.
Think about it, you have a great business and a beautiful website that gets a lot of impressions and visitors from the various search engines. You have a Contact Us page that requests contact information from your prospects and visitors. A visitor fills out the Contact Us form and receives emails from your business, but the email address they use is [email protected] or a similar email address.
Do you really think your prospect is going to open that email, especially if they are getting spam all the time from people they don’t know? Chances are high that they won’t open the email.
So here are some key reasons why businesses should NOT use FREE email accounts for business use:
- Professionalism – this is your company and identity and not the identity of free email providers. How can a lead or prospect really take you seriously when your email account doesn’t really reflect your real company?
- you get what you pay for – Have you ever had problems with free email and tried to get support and help? Since the service is free, companies are not going to put support on their priority list.
- Technical and Deliverability – If there are technical problems with the free email provider, your emails may be lost and never recovered, leaving you with no one to turn to for support most of the time. But, more serious is the fact that many emails from free providers are marked as SPAM or junk, just because of the name of the email.
- the fine print – Did you really read all the fine print and Terms of Service when you signed up for the free email service? These companies clearly state what it can and cannot do, but have no real enforcement channel for the abuse.
There are many other reasons, but the above summarizes why a business should avoid using free providers.
If a business doesn’t have a domain name registered yet, they are faced with prospects and customers who don’t take them very seriously or, in fact, ignore them completely.
With the cost of domain names as low as free, all business owners must have a domain name that identifies that business, and the corresponding emails that come with that domain name. A domain name allows a business owner to have departments, individuality and more with yourbiz.com instead of free emails. For example, you might have “[email protected]”, “[email protected]”, or “[email protected]”.
One last point, you can now send and retrieve emails on most free email provider platforms through POP mail features or other related ways. This is in addition to using Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and others as a platform for sending and receiving email.
So if a company likes Yahoo! Mail or Gmail interface, they can use those companies’ interfaces to send and receive email from “[email protected]” instead of “[email protected]”, etc.