If your business email address ends with ‘@gmail.com’, ‘@hotmail.com’, ‘@yahoo.com’, ‘@aol.com’, or @{insert your internet service provider’s address here} you’re not only not building your own brand, it’s possible that your messages may not be reaching your valued customers.
Over 85% of all email sent is spam, and internet service providers are doing everything they can to keep as much of it as possible out of their customers’ inboxes. Providers will oftentimes block all emails from a particular domain (such as hotmail.com or even gmail.com) if any single address is suspected of sending spam. Even worse, they may not even tell you. You won’t know your message didn’t get through, and your customers won’t know you were trying to reach them.
Thankfully there are two steps you can take to ensure both your individual emails and your newsletters or other broadcast messages reach your loyal customers:
- Use your own domain name for your email. You have one, right? Your website host will typically provide email support as part of your hosting package, as well as easy-to-use tools to create and manage the accounts. Their site should also contain instructions on how to set up popular email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail.
- Use an email marketing application such as MailChimp or aWeber to manage your shop’s email list. These companies do everything in their power to make sure your messages are delivered to their intended recipients and are not flagged as spam.
Besides, it’s just good business practice. You want to get all the name recognition you can; using a gmail or other address gives the impression that you’re not really all that serious about your business.
