Your email address is part of your brand

Feb 10, 2012 in Articles by Mike Ryan | 3 Comments

There is a great episode of The Simpsons where Homer is giving his email to someone. To wit:

Homer: Now, if you need to reach me, my email is chunkylover53 at AOL.
Dexter Colt: Chunky Lover 53...
Homer: It's one word.
Dexter Colt: One word.
Homer: Chunkylover53.
Dexter Colt: At AOL.
Homer: Dot com.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen professional, established personal training businesses where their primary email address is something along the lines of joesmith_pt77@hotmail.com.
This email address is proudly displayed on their business cards, mailbox flyers and- if they have one- their Web site, along side their logo and business name.

Not good.

Generic email domains like Hotmail or Gmail have their advantages; they are quick, cheap (as in, free) and easy to use and access. But they aren't necessarily a good fit for your brand. Would you buy your training equipment from a supplier whose email address was "wesellstuff_elcheapo@yahoo.com"? Imagine what your potential clients are thinking when they look at your ad or flyer. Or every time they need to contact you via email. There is a subtle yet distinct psychological effect at play here, and you don't want them feeling like they're emailing their little sister. Your business must convey an image of professionalism, and generic email domains unfortunately run counter to that.

What you need is an email address that is specific to your domain name.

Your domain name

A domain name is the name-portion of a Web address (or URL- Uniform Resource Locator). So given the Web address of http://www.fitweb.com.au/blog, the domain name is fitweb.com.au, which happens to nicely map to the name of my business.
If your business is called Simply Fitness Personal Training, then you might have a domain name of simplyfitness.com.au. It is always a good idea to do your best to acquire a domain name for your business, even if you don't have any immediate plans for a Web site. With almost 100,000 new Web sites going up every day, your chances of getting the domain name of your choice diminishes every day.

Sidebar: yep, you read that right. You don't need an actual Web site to have a domain name. Nor do you need a Web site to have a domain-based email address. You can have your sales@simplyfitness.com.au without a corresponding Web site no problems. So even if you have no plans for a Web site any time soon, I still recommend registering a domain name relevant to your business.

Here's where things are a little messed up for us Aussie fitness businesses. Domain names that end in .com.au (the Australian top-level domain) cost a small fortune compared to what our friends in the US have to pay. Expect to pay in the area of $140 for two years. If you feel your brand supports it and if you're lucky enough, a plain .com address might be available, which can be bought for as little as $10 a year (!).
For .com.au addresses, pay a visit to Melbourne IT or Domain Registration Services.
For a .com address, you have your pick of many. I have personally used (and like) NetRegistry many times.

Once you have a domain name, you can go about establishing a Web site (I will discuss Web sites in a future post) and one or more email addresses. And now you have the brand-friendly option of doing something like "info@simplyfitness.com.au".

Another sidebar: I want to point out that unless your particular service or brand justifies it, I don't recommend using individual's names for your public email addresses. Put another way, you don't want to be giving your members email addresses like joe.bloggs@simplyfitness.com.au. Instead, you should be giving out function-based addresses like sales@simplyfitness.com.au or memberservices@simplyfitness.com.au. Exceptions to this recommendation might be if you're an individual personal trainer or very small studio with only a couple trainers. In this case, personalised email addresses might actually contribute to your brand if your focus is on very personal service.

Your options for acquiring an email address

Here's where things can get a little complicated. There are many ways you can go about establishing email addresses for your business.

In general, your options are:

• Use a free mail service like Hotmail or Gmail
• Use paid mail services like Office365 or Google Apps
• Use an ISP-provided mail account
• Use a Web host-provided mail account

I'll briefly go through each one and describe what they are.

Free mail services

Services such as Hotmail and Gmail are generally excellent. They are fast, reliable, feature-rich and, well, free. But they suffer from the very problem I described above. You want your email addresses to reflect your domain name, not Google's or Microsoft's brand. However, both Microsoft and Google do offer services that let you do this; Microsoft through their Windows Live service (the evolution of Hotmail) and Google through their Google Apps Standard Edition. Both are free, and both allow you to apply your own domain name to your email accounts.

Paid mail services

Not surprisingly, the services I recommend if you wish to go the paid mail service route are from the same people who give you free ones. Google offers a paid version of their service called Google Apps for Business. Microsoft give you a choice between a paid Windows Live account or it's bigger brother, Office365. These services are very similar to their free counterparts except for things like no advertisements for the paid accounts and greater control over things like permissions. Both Google Apps for Business and Office365 are very affordable. A measly $50 per year per use for Google's product and around $7 per month per user for Office365 is a small price to pay for what you get with these products. They are not just mail services. They also offer Web-based office productivity applications such as word processors and spreadsheets.

If your business is relatively small (if you're a small club, studio or mobile trainer) then the free options might be perfectly adequate for you. If you're a little larger or if you want to take advantage of some additional business-oriented features, then the paid choices are probably better.

The downside to all of these services is that it can be a little tricky to configure them to use your domain name for your email address. It usually involves getting dirty with DNS MX settings. It's at this point I recommend you enlist the services of someone who knows about this stuff to help you. It's well beyond the scope of this article to detail how this is done,but if I have the time one day soon, I might write up a separate article on this topic.

ISP-provided mail account

When you sign up to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as Bigpond, you are usually provided with an email account that's associated with your Internet access. For example, if you sign up to Bigpond, you might be given an email address such as joebloggs10@bigpond.net.au. Don't use these accounts for your business! In fact, I even recommend against using such accounts for your personal emails too. The reason? What are you going to do if tomorrow you're offered a better deal by one of Bigpond's competitors such as iiNet? If you have a lot invested in your Bigpond-supplied email, then you are going to run into problems if you wish to switch over to another provider. You have to either pay Bigpond for an account just to keep your email address, or you have to go through the very troublesome process of contacting everyone (clients, members, suppliers, friends, family, etc) about a change of email address.

Web Host-provided mail

This is quite a common option people take because it is usually free (that is, you are usually given a certain number of mailboxes as part of your hosting account), and it's probably by far the easiest to set up because your domain is already configured and so any email accounts you set up will by definition be based on your domain name.
There are some potential downsides to this type of mail account however. Firstly, access to your email is usually only via POP or IMAP. These are protocols that allow your email client (such as Outlook or your iPhone) to receive and send emails. Whilst POP and IMAP work fine, I believe they are quite lacking in these days of cloud-based services. It is common for people to be accessing their email via a number of ways at the same time: their computer at work, the computer at home, on their smartphone, on their iPads, via Web browsers when over at a friend's house, etc. POP and IMAP aren't very adept at keeping your email in sync when used from all these different places at once. This is where Google and Microsoft's service excel. They are specifically designed to keep your emails (and contacts, tasks and calendar) in sync perfectly, regardless of where and how you send and receive your emails. So if you send an email on your iPhone, that sent item will immediately be available on your Microsoft Outlook.

In Summary

I have described some of the ways you can acquire an email account. If your fitness business is large enough to justify it, I recommend opting for either Google Apps for Business or Office365 for your hosted email. These two services are outstanding in what they offer and their integration with the many devices out there (everything from your desktop computer to your iPhone) is brilliant. If you're after something free, then Google Apps Standard Edition or Microsoft's Windows Live service are also excellent choices.

But regardless of how you come by your email addresses, the most important point to take away from this post is that you should use your business's domain name as the basis for your email address, not a generic address. Such addresses not only contribute to the consistency and integrity of your brand, but they're also portable in that you can switch email providers whenever you need to without having to change email addresses.

If you have any questions regarding any of what I've talked about in this post, leave a comment below.

Have fun!
Mike.Ryan

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Tagged Advice, Beginner, Domains, Email, Opinion