I have several pet-peeves in life. One of them is when you see small traders / businesses using a Hotmail / Yahoo account or similar free service for their email & then advertise it with the address on their vans, business cards & letter heads.
For me, that is a very unprofessional approach to the e-mail situation. What’s even worse is when the email bears no resemblance to the company name.
Case in point. Yesterday, someone had flyered the apartment block I live in. One of the business cards was for a PC Repair Clinic. For the sake of an example, let’s call it ‘Ultimate PC Repair’. The e-mail address was, however, remblanc[at]hotmail.co.uk or something equally unrelated to the company name.
That example is a double-barrelled peeve for me.
Now half of the pet-peeve here is the fact that it’s a Hotmail account. Nothing wrong with Hotmail, but when you’re a business and you’re trying to portray a professional image, please don’t opt for a free account.
The other half of the peeve is the fact that there is no correlation between the company name or email address. If you are going to use a Hotmail account, then register yourself an email address which suits your business. It is free after all!
But that’s not the point. It’s relatively in-expensive to have yourself a proper email address.
You could use a domain forwarder. Companies like FastHosts charge less than £6 (for 2years) for a .co.uk domain name. This comes with email forwarding for free so you can use an email like sales@ultimatepcrepair… and it will forward all email to your hotmail account. An instant increase in your professionalism in my eyes!
Of course, when you reply to these emails, they’re still coming from your Hotmail account.
So why not opt for the next option, where you purchase a domain & some hosting, again relatively cheaply. For example, servercentre.net will give you a domain name and hosting for less than £25 a year. This will then allow you to have your own web mail service (similar to Hotmail) which links directly to your domain name so all your emails will come from sales@ultimatepcrepair… or whatever domain you decide to choose.
Of course, there are other options & paths that you can take that’ll work. It’s different every time. These two options though, are what I’ve had experience with. Need some help setting something up? You could always get in touch!
Seriously though, for such a small outlay, is this not something that should be done as a matter of course? And lets face it, if £25 a year breaks the budget, should you really be in business?
Previously: The iPad
Next: Don't Breed Competition
Rick Nunn | Apr 14, 09:05 PM | Permalink
I fully agree with this, it is SO annoying to see this happen when it’s so simple to resolve!