why every business needs a custom email?
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Think of your business’ custom email as your own, branded corner of the internet. It is the space you own for business-related web and email traffic.
In today’s digital economy, most businesses own a custom domain for their website. However, it’s surprising how many aren’t using a custom domain for email and instead use generic email addresses like gmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, etc. Even if you have not yet registered a custom domain, the process is relatively simple and inexpensive, and the benefits to your business are significant.
Here are the top five reasons every business needs a custom email domain.
Public Image
Your company and employee email addresses make a statement about you and your business. What would you think of a job applicant whose email address is alwaysgettingfiredfreddy@gmail.com?
When your business email is mybusiness@yahoo.com, potential customers may perceive you as behind the times, unprofessional, or simply someone who doesn’t take their business seriously.
A custom domain sends a message that you are established and committed to staying around for a while. Custom domains also offer a perception of increased security and trust. People have more trust that they’re communicating with you and not with someone posing as you.
Privacy and Confidentiality
Businesses that use a generic email domain often share one company email between multiple employees or business partners. A custom domain allows you to create separate mailboxes for different users. This is essential for limiting access to sensitive information.
With one shared mailbox there is no way to tell if the email stays with its intended recipient. Emails including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Personal Health Information (PHI) should only be sent to secure, single-user mailboxes.
Control and Security
When users delete messages from a public domain the information is lost forever. Custom domains give you more control of company data. If someone leaves the company, you maintain access to the data in their mailbox. This allows you to maintain ownership of company records and comply with any data retention requirements.
Additionally, security measures in custom email domains are more business-oriented than consumer email providers. Mailboxes can be set up with unique user permissions and allow for different permissions between users and admins rather than everyone working under the same security role.
Efficiency and Scalability
A custom domain allows you to add and remove mailboxes as your company grows and changes. Additionally, you can create shared group mailboxes for collaboration. Setting up your domain and mailbox now, before you need to scale will save you significant time, money, and headaches associated with migrating years of email to a new domain.
Service Provider Flexibility
Custom domains offer the flexibility to select the internet or email service provider of your choice. They provide the flexibility to move from one provider to another without changing your email address. You lose the ability to change providers when you’re locked into a generic, provider-specific email domain (i.e. mybusiness@comcast.net). You could choose to move away from a service provider for any number of reasons. For example, you could move your business to a location not serviced by your current ISP, or your email host could change their fee structure. This is especially concerning for businesses that require HIPAA-compliant email, as the free versions of most email hosts don’t offer the settings necessary for security compliance.
Let Adlatworld get you a customized branded email. Click this link to get started
How To Use Gmail With Your Custom Domain (For Free)
People love the familiar Gmail interface, but Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, isn’t free and resorting to myname@gmail.org isn’t very professional. Luckily, there is a way to use Gmail’s email client with your custom email address.
To create a free custom domain email with Gmail, just register a custom domain, sign up with Gmail, forward the emails to Gmail, and enable Gmail to send as your domain email address. You can immediately start using your new, professional email address for your startup, blog, business website or nonprofit! Without a doubt, this is your best option for setting up a custom domain email address for free.
If you’re looking for free email hosting that uses your custom domain name, but don’t care to use Gmail for managing your email, then you can also consider Zoho Mail. Those people that are more technically inclined will likely look up Zoho’s list of features and immediately stay away as the limited features they offer make Zoho pretty clunky to use (can’t be used with Gmail or any other major email app as MAP/ POP/ Active Sync are not included!) and they offer just 25 MB of storage for attachments. If you’re not exactly clear on what these limitations mean, just understand that this plan is probably only useful if you don’t expect to get much use from the email address associated with your domain. Needless to say, I’m not a big fan and do not recommend using them as things stand right now.
However, I do recommend just signing up for Google Workspace instead. It’s much simpler and more reliable than the hack described in this post. In addition to a custom email address, you’ll have tons of extra features that make it easier to collaborate, share files, or add or remove users on your domain:
- For example, I have multiple @thedigitalnonprofit.com emails that I can use depending on the situation, like info@tdn.com, jason@tdn.com, etc.
- And when I hired a contractor, it took 2 seconds to give them a name@tdn.com email so we presented a consistent brand.
- During the contract, I could make files & events shareable with all TDN employees to easily collaborate
- Finally, when the contract ended, I could freeze their accounts with 1 click so my business’ info is safe!
All of those benefits were possible because I had Google Workspace. Sign up below to get a 14-day free trial and 10% OFF your first year!
This promotion is only available for the Business Starter and Business Standard packages. There are a few differences between these 2 plans. The main differences are that the standard plan comes with more storage space (2 TB as opposed to 30 GB) and lets you record video meetings. These added features make the standard plan more expensive but if you have a lot of files that you need to store, I’d go with the standard package.