You may think that picking the best email address for your company relies heavily on a great domain name. What if I told you other factors come into place as well? I’ve encountered the last example this very week! I bought a book 500 Social Media Marketing Tips by Andrew Macarthy. As much as the author’s knowledge of social media is exemplary, and has a great domain name for his online presence (AndrewMacarthy.com) where he dropped the ball, in my opinion, was at the end of the book. There he invited his readers to write to him at amacarthy85@gmail.com. This is just the latest example where I’ve seen an expert not getting all the possible benefits.
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There are countless times where I’ve seen dentists use a free email service address on their business card, construction workers putting a sticker on their truck or business owners just telling you this awkwardly long email address from a free service. Free doesn’t have to do anything with the wrong choice, everybody loves free, but can you imagine Jeff Bezos operating from a “jeffbezos34@yahoo.com” email address. Surely, there’s a way for him to send and receive emails from @amazon.com? You don’t have to be a billionaire to do the same!
Why waste time finding the right email address?
I am not exaggerating when I say I received hundreds of offers in my inbox for various services. Web design, SEO, domain registration, social media, copywriting, and can you guess what gives the spammer away each time? Their email address! Here are just some of them: ellisonpenelope0@gmail.com, bondkatherine447@gmail.com, lsbcklnd@gmail.com, edingershock362@gmail.com… I could go on and on. Do you want your clients to perceive you as a spammer?
Imagine having an email address on a premium domain name. Better yet, I’ll share a story. One time, someone contacted me from a two letter .com domain name. I dropped everything and ran to read what the email was about! Obviously, this was a person and a company of great importance, so I will keep their details private (since the nature of the email was private as well). People still check where the message originated from (including newsletter, autoresponder and marketing automation) and I think it is safe to assume you will get more replies to a legitimate sounding email address. For example, if you cold-email a potential investor or client, do you think they would be more inclined to answer lsbcklnd@gmail.com or “firstname@lastname.com”?
Your business stands a better chance if you conduct all your communication on your company’s domain name. Not to mention if you go ahead and promote your email on business cards, stickers, and ads.
Don’t take this as rules set in stone. Just the other day I’ve accidentally found about “MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.” This domain name obviously doesn’t fall into the category “short,” not even by a long shot! However, after I read some free content on that website, I got fantastic value! I also got the story and remembered the name in a heart beat! I just got it! His wife quit her job, and now they are making so much money, and they are blogging about it on “My Wife Quit Her Job”! Brilliant.
Here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say you have a long domain name like the one I just mentioned or something like FourHourWorkWeek.com. And let’s say your name is “Alexander The Great.” Your email shouldn’t be AlexanderTheGreat@FourHourWorkWeek.com. How is that going to fit your business card? How will someone write this down if you are sharing this over the phone or a podcast? What Alex needs to do here is register a domain name Great.com, and create an email “Alex@Great.com.” Or, if Alex, or in this case Tim Ferriss want’s to keep promoting FourHourWorkWeek.com, he can use contact@FourHourWorkWeek.com. Short first name, nickname or some other generic short word (info, email).
Which prefix do I choose for my best email address?
For example, my name is Goran Duskic. I own a domain name duskic.com. Now I can use my email firstname@lastname.com on all 10 of my websites, and it makes perfect sense. If someone wants to reach the owner of this website (webmaster.ninja), they can just write to firstname@lastname.com. Or firstname@webmaster.ninja, and then just have those messages redirect to firstname@lastname.com. This way I am not promoting Webmaster.Ninja website, but if I own ten websites, it’s going to be very hard to have ten business cards, ten email addresses and ten of everything else.
If you are thinking technology is preventing you from using an email address on your domain name, that means that you’ve decided to use gmail.com, yahoo.com, outlook.com domains. Let me ask you, have you heard of “Send mail as”?
This leads us to the choice of the right technology. Too often I encounter people with @gmail.com or @live.com emails. And then when I ask them why they don’t use their company’s domain name, the answer is “I am used to this service” or “I like Gmail’s functionality.” The two, do not have to be separated. As I have demonstrated in the “Send mail as” section, it is free, and it’s not that hard to set up.
Setting up a service like G Suite involves changing your MX records (Mail Exchanger), so it’s more complicated to set up than “Send mail as.” MX records are another type of resource record within the Domain Name System, also known as DNS. G Suite and Office 365 allow us to seamlessly send text messages from one email address to another, without touching the website server. That’s because MX doesn’t impact the website or even touching the dedicated server that hosts the website. Are you now beginning to understand why I am sharing this technical information? Just one thing though, if your domain name expires, your email will stop working, regardless of being separated from a different service from your website.
Having a separate email service (like G Suite or Office 365) means that if your website is unresponsive, your emails are still working! This isn’t the case with the “Send mail as” option. To receive the message, the original server hosting the website and email must send the message to your Gmail account.
I know this was a bit technical, but as I mentioned, too many times I’ve seen people blame technology as their cause for fumbling. Technology is here to help, not the other way around! Put your best foot forward and promote your company, not Gmail, Yahoo, MSN or your local telecom provider. I remember one time, a company owner shared his email address with me. Big mistake, it had a telecom provider’s domain name. I teased him by asking if he loved his telecom provider so much that he wanted to give them the extra promotion? He exclaimed how he, in fact, hated them because he has all these issues with them and then went on for five minutes listing issues with them, but he had no choice but to stay with them due to the contract. Don’t be that guy.
Are you spending too much time writing emails?
Before we part ways, I just wanted to mention one last thing when it comes to emails. Don’t become a slave to your inbox like I was. If you are having trouble handling mountain of emails coming your way, don’t stress! You are not alone in this! Here are several steps and ideas you can take to handle your inbox.
Let’s just sum up quickly what you’ve learned here today. The domain name is the most important part of your email (half of your email address is the domain name). It’s great if the domain name is short, but also to every rule, there is an exception. FourHourWorkWeek.com or MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. Whatever you do, don’t let that domain name be a service provider name. Put your best foot forward by promoting your company or one of your brands. Don’t let technology stop you! Use “Send mail as” option if you are tight on a budget, or get a paid solution with added benefits. For example, your email will work, even if your web shop, company website, blog) is down. And lastly, don’t become a slave to your email.