Are you professional or not?
If you run a business then you need to look professional! You can do this is various ways, such as using email aliases, forwards or inboxes. Registering a business email address is important to give the right impression of professionalism towards prospects and your clients.
Just take a moment and imagine you’re looking for a professional accounting service. You come across two companies who have the following email addresses:
Which one would you take more seriously if you’re a prospect looking to pay someone for a professional accounting service? Obviously the former. You should definitely consider registering a business email address if you want to portray an image of professionalism. There are many different tactics you could employ which you might find interesting.
Appear bigger than you are
There are some tricks of the trade you can apply to your business – even if you’re a sole trader – to make you look like a bigger business than you are. The trick: create email aliases and set up email forwards!
Have you ever noticed that whenever you make contact with a professional business or organisation that there are many different options about which business email address to send an email to? You’d probably assume the business to be large as there are multiple departments to choose from – so there must be multiple departments, right? Wrong. This is a misconception and is not always the case. You could indeed be emailing a large business – or you could just be emailing someone in their basement who knows how to use email aliases! Your business could do exactly the same.
What are email aliases?
Email aliases are not real email addresses; they’re fake email addresses that just act as automatic forwards to other real email addresses. Chances are whenever you send an email to a department, the email address of that department does not reply to you; instead, a personal email address responds. This is because when you emailed the department, it was probably an alias which just forwarded your message to the people who work in the relevant department.
If you’re a small business, you could create email aliases of multiple departments and just forward them to your relevant staff. For example, look at the following diagram:
Whenever an email is sent to the sales email alias, emails are forwarded to the sales team members; and the same works for PR and billing.
Or if you’re a sole trader, you could just set up multiple email aliases to forward incoming emails to your primary email address:
Notice how you’ll appear larger than you actually are!
Email aliases vs Email forwards
There is a difference between email aliases and email forwards. Know that as email aliases are fake, they cannot actually send outgoing emails, meaning if you want to send a reply from the original email address that an original email was sent to, you would need a real mailbox rather than an alias. Therefore you could instead just register real email addresses rather than aliases and set up email forwards to send copies to other personal email addresses. To clarify, an email forward just forwards all emails sent to one email inbox to another.
You could set up your business email system using forwards and real inboxes as follows:
Or again if you’re a sole trader:
In my opinion, using email aliases is the best and most convenient way. You can also configure your email addresses with other services like Google, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Office 365 and with various devices like your computer, tablet or mobile phone.
A proper setup keeps you organised
Having incoming emails automatically sent to the right person mean that you don’t have to do any manual organising once the system is set up. Even if you’re a sole trader like I was, just by seeing which email alias forwarded me the email gave me an insight into what the prospect who emailed was after.
Professional business email addresses are so quick and easy to set up yet I come across so many unprofessional email addresses that exemplify a scatty trader.
Be serious – you’re running a business!
Would you pay an amateur? I wouldn’t! If you’re thinking of registering a professional email address, you might want use the domain name checker to check what domain name you could use for your business email address.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks a million for reading my article. I hope you’ve found this insightful and that you can apply the right email principles to your own business or profession!
And by the way, why not subscribe to my email newsletter to receive more useful tips? I’ll give you a free ebook as a proper thank you.
I’d also love to hear or answer to any comments you may have. Feel free to share this so that others can benefit too!
Best wishes,
Nick
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