Getting an email address is easier than ever these days. Just go to Gmail, or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or any of the other free email providers, and you can have a new email account set up in minutes. When used for personal communication, these services are great. But when used for business, it’s a different story.
In fact, two different studies suggest that using a @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, or similar email address can actually hurt your business. These studies show that clients and prospective clients form judgments about the professionalism of your accounting firm based on the kind of email address you use, and that using an email address from a free email service, rather than a professional email address branded with your firm’s name, makes it less likely that prospective clients will choose your firm over a competitor.
What’s Professional?
Before we dive into the results of these surveys, let’s define a few terms.
A branded email address is an email address that has a domain (the part after the ‘@’) that is unique to your firm. Examples of branded email addresses include info@relanet.com, yourname@johnsontaxservice.com, and yourname@johnson.tax. A branded email address doesn’t have to end in .com. In fact, it might be preferable to use one of the newer domain extensions (or “top level domains”) like .accountant or .tax (as shown above). What is important is that a prospective client can look at a branded email address and instantly identify the accounting firm that it belongs to.
A free email address, on the other hand, has a domain that is associated with one of the many free email services that are available on the Internet. Examples of free email addresses include yourname@gmail.com, yourname@yahoo.com, or yourname@comcast.com. The distinguishing characteristic of a free email account isn’t whether or not it is paid for (in fact some of these services have paid options). Rather, the most important characteristic of a free email address is that it appears to be associated with a company other than your own.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about why this distinction between branded and free email addresses is one that’s worth making.
Email Addresses Matter
In a survey conducted by Visible Logic, researchers found that 70% of respondents consider a free email address to be unprofessional. And that was for a generic, unspecified free email provider. When questioned about specific free email address, some were held in even less regard. Email addresses from Hotmail and AOL, for example, were regarded as “somewhat unprofessional” or “totally unprofessional” by over 75% of respondents.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that a study conducted by GoDaddy found that consumers are nine times more likely to choose a small business that uses a branded email address over one that uses a free email address. The GoDaddy report suggests that the reason for this disparity is the first impression that’s created by these email addresses. When dealing with a new business, consumers use the business’ email address as a proxy for its professionalism, and consumers prefer working with businesses that conduct themselves in a professional manner.
What This Means for You
So what does this mean for you and your firm? It means that businesses who use a branded email address have a competitive advantage over competitors that rely on free email addresses. And this advantage is magnified for accounting firms and other businesses for which professionalism is a key selling point.
If your firm is one of the many small accounting firms in the U.S. that use a free email address, getting branded email addresses for your firm may be one of the easiest ways to improve the perception of your firm and, as a consequence, land new clients. Best of all, branded email is really cheap. So branded email is not only an easy way to professionalize your firm, it’s a cost effective way as well.
If you would like more information about branded email accounts, and how RelaNet can help your firm with them, please contact me. I would be happy to talk about your options, either by email or on the phone.
Image courtesy of Lisa Brewster.