Why you should never use free email for business.

Written by John Bloomfield |

This is my number one pet hate. Someone hands you a business card seeking your money and their email address is a free one provided by the likes of yahoo or their Internet provider. I just cant believe that people thinks this looks professional. It looks amateur and cheap.

Apart from my personal distaste there is a very strong business case for why you should not be using these email accounts.

By using an account provided by your broadband supplier you have just tied yourself to them for life, if you leave you lose the email address - and suddenly all those clients who have it can't reach you any-more!
If the provider gets taken over or decides to restructure you may find your asked to pick a new email - and all those contacts are lost.
If they have technical problems, you can't move your email away. This happened recently with globalnet taken over so many times that I have lost count, they were transferring all their old email accounts to a new server made a mistake and then suddenly hundreds of people can't get their mail and can't do a thing about it.
Server level SPAM filters, most big email providers have to use them or their servers would be flooded. Good you think but what about those emails from genuine customers that never reach you? If your in a business like mortgage broking for example you might be interested to know that "mortgage" is a scanned for spam word as is "finance"
Group emails can be difficult, none of the big providers want to be blacklisted so they will often simply block a large group email as a new client of mine recently found out when he emailed 200 people who were coming to a conference that was cancelled due to snow and not a single one got through as his providers SPAM blockers kicked in.

Professional looking email does not have to be expensive, a .co.uk domain will cost you £5.98 to buy and you wont have to renew for 2 years. You then simply need a web/email hosting service at a small monthly cost, we offer email only hosting from £2.50 per month for an account that allows you to set up an unlimited number of email addresses, of course there are other service providers out there too.

Do a favour for your professionalism today - dump the free email. (actually don't get your service provider to put together a transition strategy in place so that your existing customers get your new email painlessly over time.)

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Add comment

JComments