Imagine this scenario: you are an entrepreneur who supplies materials for final manufacturers. You register a domain name and hire a web designer to make you a nice website to sell your products. You even create some very detailed and well-written pages that your peers consider authoritative. Naturally, you would include a “Contact Us” page where your potential customers can get in touch with you. So you tell your web designer to type in your email address, and for our illustration, let’s say your email is “[email protected]”. Your website is up and running. The traffic to your website is pretty good, but you don’t seem to be getting any questions. Your web designer shows you web logs and the statistics don’t lie: most visitors to your site are browsing the moment they open the “Contact Us” page. What went wrong?
For businesses, an email address is no different than a store. A neat storefront is more likely to entice customers to come in. Same thing with an email address. A clean, professional-looking email address is more likely to be received favorably by your prospects. Let’s go back and examine the email address we used for our illustration. The first part of the address, which is the name, has twenty-eight letters. The more characters, the more confusing it is for a user and the harder it is to remember, the more likely it is to be misspelled.
The second part of the address is the domain name of the company hosting the email. There’s nothing wrong with companies like Hotmail or any of the others that provide free email to the public. In fact, they are wonderful for personal use, but certainly inappropriate for commercial use. The negative image of free email providers, and it’s certainly not their fault, is that they are the preferred venue for spammers and scammers. If you take a close look at some of the spam emails you receive, the spammer almost always uses an address from a free email provider. You do not want your business to be associated with spammers and scammers.
If you are a business and have registered a domain name for your business, the most appropriate email address to include on your website is “[email protected]” short and neat. You present yourself as professional because you give your prospects the impression that there is at least someone specifically handling inquiries. Now, in case you are not the technical contact who registered your company’s domain, contact the person who did and tell them to set up relevant accounts for you and your staff. When your prospects contact you, seeing an officially registered domain name as your email address is sure to give them the impression that you are serious about your business.
If you haven’t registered a domain name yet but have access to email, at least use your Internet provider’s email facilities. Of course, you can no longer use “info” if you’re going to use their email services, but choose a short, easy-to-remember name, one closely related to your company name and preferably limited to eight to twelve characters. By using your ISP’s email facilities, informed prospects will know that you are legitimate because no reputable ISP will allow spammers and scammers to use your domain.
Your email address is a powerful tool. Why else would spammers and scammers harness their power to carry out their devious intentions? In fact, many of them have gotten away with just using this little tool.
A good-sounding, official-looking email address will give your business not only an aura of professionalism, seriousness, and prestige, but it can also be something of a badge. It indicates your pride in your company, that you have worked hard for it, and that your prospects can have full faith in you.
