We often see businesses using Yahoo or Gmail account as their “official” business email (something like Employee.Business@gmail.com). Below we go over some of the reasons why this is less than ideal and address the most common objection we get – expense.
Professionalism
When your email address ends the same as your website URL then it is easier for people to remember both. This is helpful to the prospect/customer and reinforces your brand more effectively. Make it as easy as possible for prospects and customers to contact you.Additionally, having a custom URL for your email shows a certain level of professionalism, legitimacy and stability that having a Gmail or other free provider does not. If you have a Gmail address someone may wonder if you will be there next year because it might appear you aren’t fully invested in your business.
Legal Ownership
While appearing professional is important, there are more important legal implications of having an employee use a non-business-owned email address. Free services like Gmail and Yahoo are designed for personal use and the address and all the contents of it are the property of the person who set it up and is using it, NOT thebusiness. This means that if an employee leaves they can take that email address with them and you have no recourse. They can use it to do whatever they want after they leave, and if they left on bad terms this could be very detrimental. If you use real business email (i.e. @yourdomain) then the business legally owns the email addresses and can change the password and take control as necessary.
Spam Filtering
While Gmail does a decent job of filtering out spam and other malicious emails, many free providers do not. Good quality spam filtering is a crucial component of any cyber-security plan and part of selecting any good email hosting service is looking at their spam protection.
Cost for Professional Email
If you have a domain for a website then it is pretty easy and inexpensive to start using email that shares that domain name. Many businesses use Office 365 which is ~$5.00/email address/month at the time we wrote this, and can be set up and running in less than an hour. There are many other providers available, each with pluses and minuses. Your friendly neighborhood IT company can help you decide on what hosting solution is right for your business.Please note that we recommend you do not use the email hosting that is often bundled in with website hosting in sites like GoDaddy. The email service you get from these bundled services is often inferior, prone to interruptions, weak at filtering spam, and problematic in other ways.If you’ve ever run into and issues like we’ve described feel free to comment below. Also feel free to leave a comment about any future blog posts you might want to see.In today’s world there really isn’t a good reason for a business to rely upon a free email service provider with a generic domain. Getting set up with your email coming from your own domain name is relatively painless and helps the image of the business and can help protect it from loss of data due to employee turnover. Sawyer Solutions is here to help you with any email needs you have.