28
Is Your Email Address Losing You Clients?
New freelancers make a few mistakes that no one will tell you are mistakes, because they don’t want to offend you, or they may have already disregarded you because of this stupid mistake and don’t wish to become mired in the soup of your (sure to be squalid) company.
Now, I know your company is neither squalid nor soup-like, and I have no fear of offending you. I am, in fact, sure that I will offend you, but I embrace this honor with open arms and live not in dread.
Come now! We shall discuss the ineptitudes of others! (For I am sure that you do not do any of these things, and if you do, I am sure you will not admit to them until you have safely remedied them quietly behind the scenes.)
So. You need a professional email address.
This may seem obvious to some of you, but trust me, it continues to be a problem for many a freelancer out there. People that I have taken semi-seriously on the phone instantly lose my respect if I find out their email is something silly, or if they have a free account from one of the more commonplace (read: non-business-oriented) providers out there.
And I am a pretty easygoing person. I am down with it if you want to cuss on your promotional materials or show a picture of yourself on your website throttling a giraffe because it stole your Diet Coke. (In fact, if you do both of those things, we should definitely have coffee sometime.)
However, a bad email address is like that robot that was always freaking out on Lost in Space. “Danger!” it goes. “Danger, Will Robinson!” And even though my name is not Will Robinson, I KNOW DANGER WHEN I HEAR IT.
I am going to tell you a story about a woman who wanted to be my client some years ago. In her email address, she not only had a silly made-up email name from AOL. (I won’t tell you what it is, but the made-up equivalent is a lot like babybatshereyelashes2001.)
You know how, when you receive an email from someone, their name appears right next to the subject line? Okay. Her name began with “Jedi”, and it ended with a name that is a made-up name on the level of schoolgirls who like to pretend they are Sailor Moon’s companions or whatever it is kids are into these days.
This woman was trying very hard to convince me that I should give her discounted copywriting because she was so good at what she did in the web world that I would recoup my losses very shortly and she would only ever use me as her copywriter in the future.
A few points I would like to make here:
I was a friend of the Jedi. I am a strong supporter of Yoda and his kith and kin. I despise and fear the Dark Side of the Force, and I think that the Death Star was startlingly creepy for essentially being a gray ball with a bite taken out of it. I am ALL FOR THE JEDI. If this woman had a tiny sentence at the end of her bio about how she was a Star Wars nerd, we would likely be swooning over Han Solo together to this very day.
But it was in her EMAIL. DUDE.
Now, I’m sure that most of you are not actually doing this. I am sure you do not refer to yourself as Jedi Stronginthearm or whatever in your email account, and I am sure that the email account itself is not dirtygirlswoohoo@hotmail.
However.
Even if it is not such a glaringly terrible violation of email protocol as that example, is your email professional? And how do you know?
Here is your priority list for email addresses, people. Listen up:
First and best: Get an email address that is your web URL and your name or a common business-y type summary for the whole company. For example, you can email us here at info@menwithpens.ca. Looks very nice. Very professional. If you want to put your first name or last name in there instead of the “info” that works great too.
Second and still pretty good: Get an email address that is a well-known business email provider, and your full name. Since you are obviously not going to get andrew@gmail.com (no, seriously, you’re not going to get it. Or any other first name. And you don’t want to.), get your full name. Your full name is much better anyway because it adds an extra measure of professionalism to your address.
Do not use email addresses from the following providers as your official business email. I know they’re perfectly good providers in general, but they simply do not have the business credibility: AOL, Yahoo, and especially Hotmail.
To give yourself an idea of when the name thing is appropriate, think about business cards. If you met a guy who didn’t have an official company but who freelanced under his own name, you’d be cool with that, right? So you no longer think of that guy as James over at Men with Pens (I’m picking on James today, just because I like to). You think of that guy as James Chartrand, Freelance Copywriter.
(He wanted me to add Extraordinaire. I wouldn’t let him.)
However, if that guy handed you a business card that just said James – Freelance Copywriter, it’d be a little weird. If you’re going to trade on your name alone with no business name to go with it, use your full name when choosing an email address. I suggest putting a little period between the two, because otherwise it looks all mashed-up. john.smith@gmail.com works great.
Alright, people, confession time: How does your email measure up? Is it as professional as it can be?
Help spread the word!
Welcome to our community. Kick back, put your feet up and join the discussion.
65 Responses - We want to hear yours!
Go ahead. Leave a Comment!
-
-
-
James is reading:
-
Taylor is reading:
-
-
Social Hookups
Now you have me wondering if I should change my e-mail address….it’s from my URL www.drewbrophy.com – the artist that I represent (and my husband) but I have my own blog site as well. Hmmmmm
Maria Brophy´s last blog ..Go with the flow and drop the Attitude! (I said to me)
I think Hotmail and Yahoo addresses definitely look unprofessional. The jury is out for me in regards to Gmail addresses. I think they are a step above the rest and if Google go ahead with Google Social Search, then a Gmail address will become increasingly important and valuable.
@ Gillian – Yup, we like Gmail ourselves, and it’s pretty much been commonly embraced by the ‘business class’, as it were. At least it doesn’t sound as silly as an email that includes ‘yahoo!’ (kind of like ‘partytime’?!) or ‘hot’ (uh… no.)
@ Maria – Well, my first thought, as a consumer, is that you own a company named “Drew Brophy.” or that Drew Brophy is an actual person. If so, or if you do, great! If you don’t… uh… you may want to consider changing that
@ Adam – If you read the comment section, you’ll note that we pretty much support Gmail all over the place. We’re talking about the other types of free emails.
@ Jennifer – If you do set up a real URL/email, you might be surprised what you can do with your name
@ Paul – I hear you on the ‘logged into Gmail all day’… Me and Gmail… we’re big buddies, man.
@ Omar – If you want a job, want to be hired, want a gig, want clients and want to be respected, yes. Because any screenwriter or actor who has an email like, “sparkie97@yahoo.com” is certainly sending a silent message that he’s not a pro, he’s a clown.
Which you’re not, I’m sure. And even clowns need respectable email addresses.
What about Zoho email? How does that compare to gmail?
@Steve – I’m afraid I have no clue. It wouldn’t be one that I’d use personally, but I’m really picky about my brand names
Great article — A huge reason that Yahoo/Hotmail and the like present themselves as unprofessional is that they include *ads* in every email sent. Gmail does not place advertising in users’ outgoing emails. That alone makes a world of difference!
(P.S., If you want to use Gmail, but keep your address at your own domain, you can use Google Apps for your domain. This lets you use Gmail’s servers/interface to manage your own domain’s email addresses, while saving you the hassle of maintaining yet another email address.)
I don’t know if this was mentioned above in the comments as I didn’t read through all of them, but Yahoo (and I think Gmail) has an option that lets you use mail aliases if you can prove that you own the email address, so I can send mail from my yahoo account as any one of the 4 or 5 sites I run as “me”@”mysite.com”, and I then have forwarders set up on each of the sites to forward any mail sent to “me”@”mysite.com” back to my yahoo account.
Very simple and it looks very professional and keeps all my email in one place.
George
George Ryan´s last blog ..25 Deeply Disturbing Photoshop Manipulations
Ha, amen. I know what you mean, I had a client a little over a year ago, a man in his fifties, with an email address along the lines of Sugar he was a fun lad, and the job went through painlessly. But for the life of me, it was difficult to hold in everytime “Sugar” sent me an email!
As for me, in 2001, my family bought the domain lissner.net – so my email address is essentially my full name
great stuff.
I use my gmail address for all of my freelance work. I have my own domain name through GoDaddy and I get a free email account with that domain, but there a few reasons I don’t use it: I don’t like the web interface, the size quota is much smaller than gmail’s (which is essentially unlimited), and they charge extra for just to get IMAP and SMTP support on that single address.
James Armes´s last blog ..Using the WorkXpress API: Data Formats
@ The Other James – Teaser email accounts that give you just a bit and charge you for more kind of suck, in my opinion
@ Henrik – …Sugar… *bursts out laughing!*
@ George/Jonathan – Personally, I never did really understand how Google Apps works in regards to server emails. I use it. But then the other day I plotted out how my emails travel through my little network web of email hosts and forwards… It was… kind of scary to see email bounce around 10 times before actually getting to the inbox I read.
For those with their own domain sites and a few email boxes/addresses, simply forward these to your one gmail/yahoo/hotmail account. Most email accounts will allow email forwarding including gmail/yahoo, etc.
I have a few email addresses and need only check my main email to receive them. When responding to clients I do go to webmail of that domain, but add a bookmark or set your mail client to that account and you are one click away. Pretty easy.
I currently have my domain email accounts forwarded to my gmail. I then use their smtp server to remove the gmail address from the sender address. It’s worked fine until I was locked out of gmail. I was making changes to the forwarding settings and my emails bounced back causing gmail to block me for suspected spamming. To my dismay, I found out gmail has no customer support. It is totally automated, and besides the user forums, you can expect no support if your email suddenly stops working.
Since then I’ve been considering their business service, google apps, which offer 24/7 support for $50US a year. I’m still looking for other options but this incident was a wake up call.
If I worked full time as a freelancer then yeah, I’d finally get around to ditching yahoo but for now I’m keeping it even though I’ve known for a long time that I shouldn’t. For my full time job we all have business addresses which works fine for the office. I’m sure my yahoo address has lost more than a few potential clients but the F/T job makes them less than vital to begin with. If someone wants to work with me then great, if not, oh well (when my view on this changes so will my email).
Personally, I think just as poorly of gmail as I do of any of those others. Sure, it doesn’t sound as silly as HOTmail or yahoo but what goes through my head regardless is the simple fact that they didn’t think enough of their business (which they are invested F/T to) to bother paying for a unique address. I think gmail gets a better image for now simply because it hasn’t been around as long. Give it some time though, it’s rapidly becoming the next hotmail as it deserves.
Funny thing, I do a LOT of going out of business ads and almost every company that sends me a logo does so via their gmail address.
My two cents:
On my resume I use my First.Last@gmail instead of my company e-mail address. The reason for this is quite simple, I’m afraid that a company will see that I’m a freelance designer and automatically assume that I’m looking for work while business is slow and as soon as business picks up I will quit. Obviously if I’m applying to work at Pizza Hut this really isn’t a big consideration of theirs, but for a professional company without as high of a turnover rate I feel like this distinction could potentially be important. I’m sure that most companies wouldn’t consider this, but for the one that does I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Also, personally I agree that Gmail is much more professional than the others. It is an e-mail service designed for professionals, it tightly integrates into calendar and docs, and as soon as wave is out of beta it will also integrate with that as well. It isn’t the same as hotmail or yahoo by any stretch of the imagination, the only thing it shares is the cost, and if it didn’t nobody would use it.
I also use GMail to handle all of my e-mail tasks, it is far superior to Horde or Squirrel. Everything from Eric@domain.com gets tagged to that address, Support@domain.com another, etc. I can also send mail from GMail using any of those addresses, so it works out perfectly for me. The only complaint I have is that I can’t link both of my GMail accounts (I have a regular one that I’ve had for a long time using a nickname from when I was in school and my First.Last), but since I do a lot of web-design anyways and am constantly doing compatibility testing I use Chrome (my primary personal use browser) for all of the business e-mails, and FireFox for my personal e-mail, and then can stay logged into both at all times.