Technology Information about Information Technology
Why should you pay for an email domain that represents your company when you can have free email like Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail? After all, you are trying to cut costs, right?
Let's get the first question you may have out of the way. Yes, you can get custom email addresses cheap. A custom domain name is around &10 per year in most cases, and our Hosted Exchange based email service is less than &10 a month per account. You rarely find cheaper advertising than that. Yes, I said advertising. Depending on your business, the first time a customer sees your company name may be in your email address. Which of these looks more professional and legitimate: yourbusinessname@gmail.com or sales@yourbusinessname.com?
If your website is yourbusinessname.com, then it makes sense for your email domain to be @yourbusinessname.com. It is good advertising, and makes it easy for someone interested in your services to navigate to your website.
Another thing to consider is that on today’s Internet, it is smart to be suspicious of emails from people you do not know, as they can contain viruses, malware, spyware, and unwanted advertisements. In many cases, a potential customer may not even want to open your email if it comes from a free service like Gmail. It is much more likely that people will trust an email from a professional domain, especially one they recognize.
Other than the professionalism and advertising benefits, there is a solid functional reason to have your own email domain is the flexibility it gives you to set up and delete email aliases. This can be done by department or on an individual basis. You can set up admin@yourbusinessname.com, support@yourbusinessname.com and have them forward all email to you. Or you could set up resumes@yourbusinessname.com and have them route to your HR department without having to pay for additional email accounts.
If your business has employees, would you rather have them using their own personal Gmail or Yahoo accounts for business? If that employee happens to leave your company, you want have access to all of their business emails, and possibly undelete some emails they may have deleted when they left. You cannot access their personal email accounts. It's your company, you own those emails, and you should have access to them regardless of whether the employee still works for you or not.
So for security, professionalism, legitimacy and advertising, a custom domain and professional email account is the way to go for all businesses, large, medium or small.
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