One of the most important parts on setting up a new business is sorting out how your customers, suppliers, partners and other people will be able to get in touch with you.
While things like Twitter can be a good way of establishing informal contact and engaging with people, the majority of your business communications are likely to be done by email or phone.
This means you need a dedicated phone number (if not for every member of your team then at least one official landline business number people can use for inquiries) and dedicated email addresses.
If your business is really just you (for example if you are doing something on a freelance basis), you may think it easiest to simply set up a free email address on a service like Gmail or Outlook and use this, however this is pretty much never the best thing to do.
Why You Need Email Addresses on a Company Domain
If you set up an email address using a commonly used free service like Gmail, your address will end up being something along the lines of “[email protected]”.
Already, this gives off an amateurish impression, because most people expect a legitimate company to have their own domain and properly hosted email, rather than using free services aimed at personal users.
Additionally, this model of naming makes it very difficult to have different, logically named email addresses for different purposes.
Where a company may have a general info mail address ([email protected]), a sales address ([email protected]) and perhaps some personal ones for different people who work for the company ([email protected] or [email protected]), working out what to call these when they all have to fit as unique Gmail or Outlook addresses is tricky to say the least, and you’ll probably end up with something that isn’t consistent and is hard for customers to remember.
What is the Best Way to Get Company Email Addresses?
The best way to get proper, professional looking email addresses you can use for your company is to get them as part of the web hosting package you get for your business website.
Many web hosts also offer hosted email, some with unlimited numbers of email addresses but most with at least five (which is serviceable for a small one or two man operation, allowing you personal email addresses and a couple of general ones). You will usually purchase a domain as part of setting up your web hosting, so your domain name will be used for your email addresses too.
You can normally set the addresses up using the dashboard facilities on your web hosting provider’s system, and then you can configure your preferred way of interacting with your email accounts (for example you can set up Gmail or Outlook to show you these mailboxes, and also configure things like an iPad or smartphone to access them too).
This means you get the convenient interface style you are used to using for your personal email accounts while also having the professional appearance of properly hosted addresses on your own domain (which means you can name the individual mailboxes whatever you like because only you are using that domain).
Featured images:
License: Royalty Free or iStock
source: http://pixabay.com/en/telephone-meeting-phones-42135/
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
This guest post is written by Daniel Nector, a software engineer and a part time blogger. Working with VMTech for the last few years, he has helped the company provide one of the best managed email services in the country. According to him, cloud storage is going to be the future of technology.
