If you are still using Gmail, Yahoo or similar services as your business email, it’s time to think again. Professional email hosting, together with your own, unique email address can do wonders for your business. Here, are eight reasons why you need professional email.
- Trust
If someone receives an email from a business, they expect it to have a business domain name in the address. If it comes from a different domain, people can become suspicious about whether it’s a genuine email or from a scammer. Anyone can set up a ‘[email protected]’ email address, but to have a ‘[email protected]’ address, you have to register the ‘mybusiness.com’ domain name first and that helps users trust the sender more.
Indeed, it’s not just people who are suspicious. Spam filters that use advanced algorithms to seek our potentially fake business emails may even prevent your messages from being delivered. - Professionalism
Shifting from a free Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo email to a domain-based email also speaks volumes about the professionalism of your business. It tells potential customers that you are not doing things on the cheap and have invested in establishing your business brand. It shows you are a company that does things seriously, in a business-minded way. Which email address do you think customers would take more seriously: ‘[email protected]’ or ‘[email protected]’ - Reputation
In today’s competitive market, the reputation of your brand is vital to the success of your business. Purchasing your own domain name prevents others from using it and thus protects the reputation of your brand. At the same time, every time you send an email, your brand and all it stands for is displayed in the email address. - All the email addresses you need
With professional email hosting, you can set up multiple email addresses to allow your business and those within it to communicate easily and effectively. You can have individual addresses for every member of your team, department addresses (e.g., sales@), short term addresses for specific events (special-offer2021@) and even Do Not Reply addresses for automated email campaigns (do_not_reply@). - Control over your communications
Professional email hosting makes it easy to take control of your email communications. You can create new and delete old email accounts, set up email forwarding, autoresponders, create tasks, individual and shared calendars and contact lists all from within an easy-to-use dashboard. You can also access your email on a browser via webmail or through an app like Outlook. - Cut out spam and malware
With an advanced spam filter, like SpamExperts, included in your email hosting plan, you can help boost the security of your company. SpamExperts not only cuts out 99.98% of all spam emails; it also prevents malware, ransomware, phishing and emails with spurious links landing in your inbox. With this type of cyberattack becoming more prevalent, professional email hosting can reduce the potential for your systems to get infected or your company to get hacked or defrauded. - Have the same domain for your email and your website
Join the dots and complete your brand building by having the same domain for your website and your emails. Once you buy the domain name (average cost about £10 to £20 per year) you can use it for both your website address e.g., ‘mybusines.com’ and your email addresses.
When people click on a link in one of your emails to your website, having the same domain name in both reassures them that the email is legitimate and increases confidence to buy. At the same time, you establish consistent branding across all of your online channels of communication, raising the reputation of your company even more.
What’s great is that some hosting plans come with both website server hosting and email hosting included, so you can have both services for the price of one. - Protect customers with email certificates
With scammers sending out so many fraudulent emails pretending to come from legitimate businesses, it’s easy to see why some customers become victims of fraud and staff fall for internal-mail-related phishing attacks. One way to protect your customers, indeed, anyone your company communicates with by email, including internal recipients, is to use email security certificates. These encrypt email and attachments to ensure that hackers cannot intercept or tamper with them, and they also verify that the sender is who they purport to be and not a fraudster using a fake email address.
Conclusion
If you are a small business still using Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or other free email services to send business communications, a professional email hosting plan can make a big difference to your company. It can improve trust, reputation and branding, make it easier and more effective to communicate and provide you and your customers with more secure ways to interact.
For more information, visit our Email Hosting page.
