Creating a brand, but using yahoo.com email address?

The awareness on possessing professional email addresses is moving in a positive direction. Those who have tried and registered their own domain, opened professional email addresses, gained more credibility and show a level of professionalism and seriousness in their work.

Increasing trend of usage

Over the years, I often have meetings with company representatives and we usually exchange business cards. I have a habit of collecting and keeping business cards, mostly because of the variety and creativity in their design, but often they can be useful for the person’s / company’s contact.

Today I sat down and I gathered all the cards on one pile to check how many of them don’t have a professional email address. To my surprise, only 5 out of 30 business cards had an email address on @ yahoo.com, which is a good statistic unlike a few years ago, when half of them were with unprofessional email addresses. This suggests that the awareness among people and companies has increased, and those who want to be serious about their work have realized that their presentation must be with professional email addresses.

 

 

How do I perceive the companies with or without professional email addresses?

The “best ones” were the ones that have registered their own company domain and website, but they’ve put an email address on @ yahoo.com. This is simply unacceptable, and the message they conveys is: yes, we have our own domain and website, but we love our old email addresses on @ yahoo.com so much that we would even put them on the business cards. Or maybe they have created professional email addresses, but the new technology, change and transition is giving them a hard time (used to the old ways and refuse to make changes).

Those who have tried and registered their own domain, opened professional email addresses, in my eyes gained a level up in professionalism and seriousness. The chances to cooperate with these people are so much bigger than with those who didn’t sit down and take time to think this through and use many small resources they’ve got to register their own domain and create email addresses.

This rule applies to everyone, even if it is about personal branding

We live in a time where e-mail communication is necessary. Do you remember fax machines? We stopped using them many years ago and we were acting as rebels against the fax as a medium of communication. We didn’t want to receive fax messages and we were sending and “teaching” how to send messages those asking for a fax. It’s no longer acceptable with so many social media and ways of online communication to use a fax, which is already in the past.

‘Could you fax over a copy?’

‘No, I can’t fax because of where I live’

‘Where do you live?’

‘The 21st century’

I often receive an email from an expert, but when I see that he has written to me from an email address such as: mouse981@yahoo.com, immediately his expertise falls into water and he loses all the credibility that he writes about in his email. The same thing happens with @ hotmail.com, it just seems like you’re stuck in the nineties using such email addresses.

The only exception would be if you use the @ gmail.com email address, but only if you use it as name.surname@gmail.com, and not whitemousee@gmail.com.

How to change the old tradition?

If you want to make contact with someone through collaboration email, then you must use your professional brand email address and communicate through it.

Even, you can only register a domain name, create an email address, and make redirection to your private email. You don’t have to make a big change immediately.

Besides increasing your professionalism and credibility in representing your company, using professional email addresses will contribute towards bigger satisfaction among your clients and your employees. Our accounting didn’t use professional email addresses until a year ago and the employees used one common email address.

The communication process with them was very difficult and we always had to make few phone calls and very often to go there in person to deliver documents. Now, each of their employees has a professional email address with their name and company domain and the communication goes smoothly and quickly.

We know exactly to which employee to write and, if necessary, scan a document and send it to his/hers company email, but now it’s easy when all employees have their own dedicated company email.

What do you think which person has more respect and credibility, the one who has left a professional email address on the business card or the one who wrote on his/her business card: mouse981@yahoo.com?