What Does a Professional Email Address Look Like?

You’re not still using samantha2013@gmail.com as your professional email address, are you?

“If a potential client had an email like taxmanjoe2012@aol.com, I wouldn’t even bother contacting him as I can tell that he doesn’t take his business seriously.”

Domains are cheap these days. Email hosting costs about a latte per month. If spending a few bucks would take your business from unprofessional to professional, you’d spend it. Right? (HINT: Yes!)

A domain for your business isn’t even a question anymore: you must have a website for your business. Whether you’re a one-man shoe shop or a 400-person company, you need a domain name. Then every person in that company needs their own email address.

Every single email you send is a tiny reminder or advertisement for who you are representing. If you email address ends in gmail.com, you’re giving a small mention to Gmail.com. How sweet of you. Why not use you@yourbusiness.com?

Let’s cut to the chase: you need to have you@yourdomain.com and you now agree.

So now what? I have one single recommendation after going through dozens of email hosting companies over the past decade: Google Apps for Work.

It’s basically just like Gmail (works the same, same look and feel, same features), but you have you@yourdomain.com. There are 6 reasons why to use Google Apps for Work below, but let me spice up the offer right away.

Google Apps for work now costs $50 per year per user. We were offered a reseller relationship with Google Apps and now have a coupon worth a 20% savings per user. All you need to do is grab the coupon code over at our partner’s site and then sign up for Google Apps and you’re all set.

Why use Google Apps for Work? Let’s count the ways.

1. Managed email: Google is managing your email servers. Do you think their servers go down very often? (HINT: no.) If you switch hosting companies for your website, you don’t have to touch your email hosting as it’s separate from your website host.
2. 15 gigabytes of space: 15 GB disk storage and it grows everyday (albeit just a little). That should keep you happy for years unless you attached giant photos of your kids to every single email (TIP: not a good idea.).
3. Less spam: Google Apps mail has very strong spam guards which automatically delete unwanted emails, before they reach your inbox. If you need to check them, there’s a spam folder. It will also learn what’s spam and what’s not.
4. Search: Forget organizing items into folders, Google Apps search is wicked fast.
5. Mobile Compatibility: iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry all have built-in Gmail support. To set it up, just choose the Gmail option but don’t forget to use you@yourdomain.com as the login (and not a Gmail address).
6. Security: Gmail uses HTTPS encryption to keep your mail secure and is amongst the best protected email service available. TIP: that doesn’t mean hackers can’t get in! Use a strong password always!

Please compare that to any other email hosting provider then compare the costs. As a website developer for the past 10 years having hosted hundreds of sites and email, I can tell you the one thing that I love about clients who host their email with Google Apps: I never hear from them again. It rarely (if ever) is down, it just works on their phone, and the spam filtering is excellent.

I did a little research into what a “professional email address” looks like. I was disappointed in what I found.

• “I’d expect john-doe-1234@gmail.com to be perfectly fine. Just avoid using something like sexykitten69@gmail.com.” No! john-doe-1234@gmail.com is not a professional email address!
• Someone was asking, “For example, do people consider j.doe456@email.com to be worse than a j.doe@email.com? Most of the email domains on popular email sites (GMail, Y!Mail etc.) are mostly taken.”
  They’re taken? Of course they are! Maybe that’s a sign that you should use your own domain name. Then you can also make it more personal. Using the example here, it might be john@johndoe.com.

Are you ready to take your email to the next level? Don’t wait, don’t hesitate, sign up for Google Apps for Work today and save 20% on all users with the coupon code for the first year!