When you’re establishing your own business, a little detail like an email address may not seem that important. Provided your prospective customers can get in touch with you, that’s all that matters – right? Actually, just as your personal email address can say a lot about you, so can your company email address and it also affects the way your business comes across to potential customers. Here’s why it’s best to have a custom email address for your business.

Build trust

First and foremost, using your own custom domain in your email address gives you credibility. To illustrate what we mean by that, think about how you’d feel about a big company if they emailed you from an email address ending in a common email provider such as hotmail.com or gmail.com. The chances are you’d wonder whether you could trust that company; using a common email address that anybody could get hold of calls into question a company’s authenticity.

When you exchange emails with a business, you expect them to have an email address with the same domain as their website. Compare [email protected] with [email protected] and you’ll see the difference. One looks professional and matches the website address, while the other appears inexperienced – even amateur.

Coordinate and strengthen your brand

You’ll likely be giving out your email address in numerous different places, and lots of people will see it, whether it’s on your website, your business cards or in a reply on social media. Using a custom email address helps to strengthen your brand by ensuring that your brand name, website address and email addresses are coordinated. This keeps your brand coherent across all platforms, and avoids the mixed messages that can confuse your prospective customers. Even better, a .cymru or .wales email address reinforces your ‘Welsh and proud’ messaging.

You have more options with a custom email address

Even leaving aside the fact that a Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo email address looks unprofessional for a company to be using, there’s another reason why using a custom email address makes sense. So many people use the common free email platforms that all the good addresses are taken. With your own domain, on the other hand, you can dream up anything you like.

This means you can be creative, as with our [email protected] example – which sounds friendly as well as being memorable. Looking again at the Hotmail example above, it’s actually extremely unlikely that a simple address such as [email protected] would still be available. Often, the only email addresses available would have to contain random numbers, such as [email protected] – which looks even more unprofessional, as well as being difficult for potential customers to remember.

It’s easier than you might think

While setting up a Gmail or Hotmail email address might seem the easy option – especially if you already use these platforms for your personal emails – setting up a custom email address is easier than you might imagine. Once you’ve bought your domain, you can log into your web hosting and quickly set up your email address (or addresses) from there. If you’d rather use a familiar email interface, you should find instructions on how to set up your new custom email address within a user-friendly platform such as Gmail or Outlook.

So, if you want to make sure your business looks credible and professional from the word go, make sure you get a custom email address that matches your domain. It’s quick and easy to do, and it’s a simple way to ensure that your brand gives the right impression to potential customers.