Don’t Waste The Opportunity.
In the nearly ten years since I wrote this, freebie email accounts such as Google, Yahoo, etc., have lost a lot of their “free” taste because they’re so ubiquitous now. However, having your own domain address is still a smart branding move. –t.
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First appeared on Bootstrap Bookmarketing Coop. Published on: Dec 18, 2009 @ 11:41
It staggers me the number of professional and brilliant authors who have their own websites and domains (www.authorname.com) but haven’t bothered to use the email address that comes with that domain (authorname@authorname.com). They’re still using authorname@yahoo.com or their gmail address, or some other free account of some kind.
When I quiz the author on this, the answers are understandable. It’s too much fuss and bother to change over email addresses. They’re already running two, three, four or more email accounts already – who wants to add another email account to check?
The responses are understandable, but possibly not justifiable when it comes to a marketing perspective. Here’s some things to think about:
1) Everyone knows you’re using the free accounts.
It doesn’t look very professional. Readers may not hold it against you consciously, but they’ll notice on a subliminal level.
2) You’re losing a prime opportunity to impress your name upon readers every time they see your email address.
People don’t register what’s on the left side of the “@” But they do look to see what’s on the right, to see who the email is from. You do this yourself. Notice how you process the information in an email address next time you get an email. If it’s a new address from someone you don’t know, you’ll see that you check to the right first, then barely register what’s on the left, after that. It’s the domain that is the most critical part of the address. If you’re sending out emails from Yahoo or Gmail, you’re doing their advertising for them. Why not advertise yourself, instead?
3) Don’t check your email on-line. Use a desk-top email program instead.
If you’re resisting using your domain’s email address because you don’t want to have to bounce over to yet another on-line site to check yet another webmail site, then don’t. Every email account you have can be sucked down to a desktop email program and they can all be checked in one spot, on your desktop. No bouncing around the Internet required.
The premier email program for Windows, and certainly the most popular, is Outlook, but you have to pay for it. I swear by this program — it runs my life. [This is no longer true — Outlook.com is a free program – t.]
There is Outlook Express, which is free, and tied into Internet Explorer. [And this program has been folded into Outlook.com]
And there is Mozilla Thunderbird, which is hands-down, the most popular open-souce (read: “free”) desk-top email program out there. There are support forums and discussion groups for this program, too. I also have this installed to help out my Bootstrap authors who have it. It can be a tad techy when you’re getting an account set up, but it runs without a hitch after that.
There’s also Windows Mail, which comes installed with all new Windows computers.
And there’s Windows Live Mail, which is different from Windows Mail, but is also a desktop email program that can handle multiple accounts.
Another program that is extremely popular is Eudora, but this is either free…or not. The free version comes loaded with ads and limited functions, and you have to pay for the program to get rid of the ads and free up the functions. I don’t like it because of this bait-and-switch handling of the pay-for end of things. But people do seem to like Eudora.
Once you have an email program installed and running, you can download your email from all your email accounts to your desktop, then filter, sort and read them all in the one program. This should remove any objection to having to handle one more email account. I curently handle five email addresses and 700 emails a day, all within Outlook, which also handles all my Tasks, Calendar, To Do list, and Contacts and cross-references the lot. As I said, it runs my life.
4) Your Email Address Moves With You
Just like your domain, your email address moves with you if you ever have to up stakes and move to another web hosting company. This happened to me just this weekend when I had to move my personal website in a very big hurry. Because I’ve been using my domain email address (Tracy@TracyCooperPosey.com) for years now, I lost use of the address for a grand total of three hours while the DNS servers repropagated. But that was all. However, if for some reason I’d had to move my address from Gmail to Yahoo, after five years of marketing it across the Internet…I don’t even want to think about all the places where that address is lodged now. I’d never recover from such a move.
You may think that Gmail and Yahoo will never disappear. But it may interest you to know that Yahoo has just come out with a new domain: Ymail.com. It’s changing all its addresses over to that. It’s possible that if you’ve got a Yahoo.com address, they may change yours soon. There’s nothing in the fine print that says they can’t. How long have you been marketing your author name under that address? [2017 update: Ymail has disappeared and Yahoo.com/ca/etc is back…which proves how unreliable the free email accounts can be. -t.]
And bigger companies than Yahoo have financially collapsed and disappeared before now.
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Four very good reasons to think about adopting your domain email address despite the initial fuss involved.
Think about it.