Choosing Email Addresses for Your Website

Once you have decided on your website domain name, and set up the webhosting for it, you can choose your own email addresses to go with it. Thinking about email addresses, and setting them up from the start can save confusion and work later in the lifecycle of the website.

If it is a purely personal website such as a blog of your life, then you can confidently use your existing personal email address.

For a business website, we recommend setting up separate email addresses for business correspondence such as info@example.com for a number of reasons:

• It is simple to setup and use, and included in the pricing of most website hosting packages
  

  

• If you envisage growing your business and taking on staff to assist with email correspondence, you probably won’t want them accessing
  your personal emails
• A business email account which is tied to your website domain name such as info@example.com shows a direct association with the website name (Gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail etc are very good but they can be made by anyone not associated with the domain name)
• There is flexibility to set up as many email addresses as you like, you can make a small business appear larger, with departmental em
  ails such as sales@example.com, accounts@example.com etc and use your regular email program to access and reply to all of them

Choosing Email Addresses

Depending on the type and size of your business, there are a few different ways you can set up your email addresses. Keep in mind that you can have virtually unlimited email addresses of any name which you choose. Email addresses can also be forwarded to another email address.

Role Based

These are emails like sales@example.com, info@example.com and are useful if more than one person may be answering emails. For example, if Bob & Mary time-share a job which involves answering sales enquiries each may answer emails on different days of the week so it would be better if they both look at the sales@example.com email box. If there were separate bob@example.com and mary@example.com email boxes then enquiries may go unanswered for days if they didn’t check each other’s email boxes. Also, if Bob were to leave the company, many people would still be sending email to his address unless an email forwarder was put in place.

Personal

These are emails like bob@example.com and mary@example.com, they can be very useful in some circumstances. If a business is strongly tied to services that only Bob or Mary provide and people need to feel they are in direct contact then these would be more suitable. Some examples may be personal counseling, general practitioners. If you are planning on selling the business in the future then these may not be best for the longer term.

Other notes

It is a good idea to set up a ‘spam trap’ email, during the course of your online website business you will inevitable be joining online services which expose your email address to people seeking email addresses to spam. Something like web@example.com can be useful to use for this, to keep spam segmented into a different email box.

Summary

If you are planning to grow your business to have other staff checking emails, set up separate email addresses. Generally, ‘role based’ email addresses are good unless there is a perceived need by the customer to be in close personal contact with an individual. Or you can have a combination of role based and personal email addresses.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!