Having an email address for your clients or customers to contact you is one of the first things you set up when starting your business. When you are starting out, having a free email seems like the right choice but spending those few extra dollars on something that may just help turn that contact into a lead makes it all worth it. Having a professional business email address your customers can recognize and trust is incredibly important and here’s why.

Building a Professional Image

When you are starting out as a small business, building your professional image is an uphill battle. Your main goal is to acquire new customers and build long-lasting relationships. I don’t know about you but if I am looking for an electrician, I am more inclined to email [email protected] instead of [email protected]. When a person looks at these two emails, there is already a small amount of trust built because they know a company or an individual with a company will be on the other side and not a potential spam scheme for them to fall into.

Avoid Being Seen as Spam

Speaking of spam, if you are doing any email marketing or contacting clients via email, there is a high likelihood that [email protected] may come with that spam warning we all fear to see. This could deter your customers from responding to you and they may even mark your email as spam which will make it more difficult for you when emailing other customers.

Branding Your Company

Having a professional business email helps market your business. When people look at an email like [email protected] they know it’s a company and if they want to see that companies website, they just need to search electricco.com. Having your business website easily available to current and new clients can help build long-lasting relationships and returning customers.

Owning Your Domain

The domain name for your business deserves its own post but here are some quick reasons why this is important. A domain name is the part that comes after the @ in an email address. For [email protected] the domain is electricco.com. If you have a professional business email you create the part that comes after @ and once that’s created, it’s forever locked and only your company can have it. As long as you keep paying the bill of course. This means other competitors can’t steal your business name, at least in email form and you can further market your company by building your own website on that domain.

Extra Business Tools For Your Company

Depending on who you choose to purchase your email address from, it will come with extra business tools that will help your company grow and succeed. Let’s use Google as our example. Their business email tool Google Workspace (formerly GSuite) comes with a suite of tools like Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Drive and more. These tools can be essential to your new business and help kickstart any project you have.

Conclusion

You may have noticed but all of these reasons to spend the time and extra money on a professional business email all connects to one thing. That one thing is Trust. Building trust with your customers and community is essential to building a business. Without trust, it’s very hard if not impossible to succeed. Starting and running a business is hard enough so any edge you can gain can go a long way with you and your clients/customers.