A branded email address is one of the most cheap and simple things a business can have to present a professional image online.

Yet it’s surprising how many business owners don’t use them. This actually un-does a lot of the value and hard work put into producing a good website in the first place.

Let me explain . . .

The other day I was shopping in my local supermarket. The community noticeboard caught my eye so I took a few moments to read it. There was a hand-written message from a “web designer” advertising his services.

(Never hurts to check out the competition).

After the usual blah blah blah he’d also written his contact details. These included an email address in the form of hisname@iprimus.com. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want someone designing my professional online image when they couldn’t even be bothered to get their own right.

A branded email looks like one that goes info@yourwebsitename.com. Using free email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail for your business just screams out cheap and nasty. When I see them I think,

“Well, that outfit can’t be any good. They can’t even afford a proper email address”.

What I found sad was that this designer also listed his website as well. Once you sign up for web hosting, you automatically get a number of email inboxes to go along with the account. (With paid hosting anyway). It takes less than two minutes to set up an email inbox branded with your own domain name. So why wouldn’t you?

I’m not making any judgements about this designer’s ability. Maybe the next thing on his to-do list was to update his email.

Still, I can see how some people who’ve been using free email addresses for years might be reluctant to change. After all, you wouldn’t want to cheese off all your customers . . .

But not doing so is like saying,

“No thanks, I’ll stick with my old DOS based computer. I don’t have time to learn windows!”.

Especially when it’s so easy to let all your customers know AUTOMATICALLY.

Here’s how it works.

• Set up your new custom email account as discussed.
• Set up a Message Forwarder from the generic email address to the new one.
• Set up an Autoresponder Message to go back to the sender.

On the autoresponder let people know your new email address. Some of them may try to email you again. If not, you’ll still receive their original message thanks to the forwarding service. Here’s how easy it is to do it in Gmail . . .

Setting up a Forwarder in Gmail:

1. Click Settings at the top of the Gmail page.
2. Open the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. Put in the address you’d like messages sent to.
3. Click the drop-down menu and choose an action. You can keep a copy of the message in your inbox or send it to Trash.
4. Click Save Changes.

Setting up the Auto Responder:

• Click on the “General” tab in Step-2 above.
• Scroll down to “Vacation Responder“. Click on the radio button to turn it on.
• Type in the subject and message details.
• Save the changes.

Most free email services will provide similar functionality to Gmail. Just do a search on “forwarding” and “auto responder” in the Help files to find out how to set them up in other programs.

As you can see, all it takes is a few clicks to update your business’ email addresses. Remember to create a new inbox under your hosting account first.

Branded email addresses send a message of consistency and quality about a business. Don’t let yours be dragged down by a scruffy generic email.