If you’re serious about marketing your business online, you’re going to need a branded email. Yep, [email protected] just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
The image you give of your company is important, and it matters. But that doesn’t mean you have to have a fancy logo, gold leaf business cards, or rent a space in the nicest building in town.
A lot of times, it’s all about the small things. Many small things that together bring cohesion (and ultimately trust) to your brand.
It’s these types of things that can, even subliminally, send trust indicators about your company to your potential new customers.
Today, we’re going to be talking about one of those small things—branded emails.
It’s actually easy to do, relatively inexpensive, and will say a lot about your brand.
First Impressions Matter
Be honest, when someone asks for your email address and you give them the same one you’ve been using since high school, it’s a little embarrassing, isn’t it?
Well, if it’s not, it should be.You are a real, legitimate business. And you should correspond as one too. That means it’s time for a branded email.
What’s a branded email? A branded email is one that is associated with your website domain. For example, my email address is [email protected] (ogalweb.com being my website’s domain).
Branded emails help associate you with your company. They tell people that you’re established, professional, and you’re the kind of person who likes to have their ducks in a row.
Build Brand Awareness
A branded email is just another piece of the puzzle that paints a picture of your company. It associates you with your company.
People get confused about “branding” and they think that this means they need a fancy & expensive logo—but that’s simply not the case.
Branding is about consistency and cohesion.
Essentially, you want people to be able to instantly recognize your company. This does not require a flashy symbol, it requires creating a consistent message.
Using a branded email address provides an additional layer of cohesion. Your email matches your website, your website matches your company. All of these things are obviously related, which brings a level of comfort to people because they don’t have to make assumptions.
Separate Business & Personal
As a small business owner you already know the importance of organization. Chances are, you wear a lot of hats.
A lot of the business owners I work with are the marketing director, laborer, customer service rep, HR department, and collections all wrapped into one.
Juggling all of these responsibilities takes a good amount of organization and discipline.
Creating a separate workspace for your business email is an important part of that structure. This separates “work you” from “personal you”. Keeping all your business correspondence in one place, and all your personal emails in another.
None of us like searching through, what seems like, and endless inbox looking for that ONE email. When you have to search through not only all your business emails, but your personal ones too, it just makes the job that much harder.
You can take this a step further by having separate email addresses (or aliases) for different departments of your company, such as; billing@, orders@, support@, etc.
This level of organization can help you become more productive and focus on each individual aspect of your business one at a time.
Okay, So How Do You Get a Branded Email?
It’s actually not too difficult to do, but choosing the right provider is crucial.
There are many different services out there that can handle this for you, but many of them have major issues with deliverability, spam, and don’t offer easy-to-use interfaces.
A common free alternative is using your website host for “free” email service. There are major issues with this, no matter how tempting it may be. It’s common to see bounced emails, discoverability issues, and if you ever want to change hosts it can be VERY difficult and expensive.
I’ve just about every option, and I keep coming back to Gsuite, by Google.
Gsuite runs off an email interface that you are probably already used to: Gmail. This makes learning how to use your email a breeze. Even if you haven’t used Gmail in the past (where have you been?), I’m confident you’ll find learning how to use their platform simple.
It also comes with an entire suite of tools that can help you manage your business, including: Google Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and much more.
All of these tools are linked to your email address, and come with all kinds of options to share documents internally with your team through your business account.
Sounds awesome, right? It is! But, it’s not free.
The “basic” plan of Gsuite (which is what I recommend for most businesses) will cost you $6 per email address, per month.
Because people are so used to “email being free” this often comes as a bit of a shock.
I’m here to tell you, it’s totally worth it.
In the end, this ends up being about $0.20 per day, which really isn’t much—especially when you take into consideration all the functionality that comes with it (not to mention all the benefits of having a branded email we already talked about).
Are You Ready to Move Forward?
Great! I know you’re making the right decision.
The first step will be to sign up for Gsuite at https://gsuite.google.com.
Every account starts with a free 14 day trial, so if you find that it’s not the right fit for you, it’s no issue to cancel your account.
The setup is laid out for you step-by-step, but there are a few technical bits that trip people up sometimes. There are some domain verifications, and records that need to be added to your domain.
Google will provide you with all the documentation to do this, but if you’re not familiar with adding records to your domain it can be a bit intimidating.
No fear, just contact me, and I’ll be more than happy to help get you setup.
Wrapping It Up
A branded email isn’t the only thing that will convey your professionalism to your customers, but it is an important piece of the puzzle.
This will help you increase brand awareness, help with your organizational efforts, and give your customers a positive first impression of your business.
It’s not always about doing the big things—sometimes it’s about doing a lot of the little things right.
Keep in mind, if you do get a branded email you’ll want to update all your marketing material—both digital and physical. This can mean you need to reprint business cards, brochures, signs, etc.
