Through creative marketing, advertising, and graphic design, Marty Marsh helps coaches, consultants, and service business professionals to attract an endless stream of clients to their soul-
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Is Your E-mail Address
Killing Your Business?
by Marty Marsh
What’s your e-mail address saying about you? Are you inadvertently killing potential sales and interest in your business with an inappropriate or unprofessional e-mail address?
Recently, I attended a networking event and struck up a conversation with someone who was offering a unique service and I was very interested and could immediately see great potential for this business concept.
We exchanged business cards with promises to stay in touch, so it wasn’t until I went to enter her e-mail address in my system that I was just stopped dead in my tracks and was totally turned off by the e-mail address she was using for business people to contact her. I found it offensive to be using such an address for her business.
She presented a perfectly professional image in all other ways. Her business card was four-color and on a nice quality stock. She had obviously put some time into the development of her image. She even presented herself as the consummate professional and I bet she is.
But she blew any goodwill she had garnered with me entirely when I encountered her e-mail address: hotsugarmama@blahblah.com.
Now on a personal level, I would not have been offended by that and may have been mildly amused. But to use that professionally just reeks of—well—unprofessionalism.
And so of course, my next thought is how unprofessional might she be in her business because the service she is selling involves contact with very sensitive personal information of her clients.
Some other e-mail addresses I’ve seen lately were along those same lines:
- thedeadrule@blahblah.com (the guy was selling insurance but was a big fan of the Grateful Dead).
- liquidlover@blahblah.com (an owner of an upscale private clothing seller). I didn’t ask the meaning of that one.
- chewchewhuhhuh@blahblah.com. What?
Do you get the idea of how inappropriate these e-mail addresses are for business?
Another pet peeve of mine is business people using Yahoo, Hotmail, Juno, and AOL e-mail accounts for their business address.
Now, I have nothing against those providers per se, but they do not project a professional image for your business. Plus they often severely limit what you can do with your e-mail accounts.
Best thing you can do right now is to register your own domain name and start using that as your e-mail address. Like mine: marty@martymarsh.com or yours would be yourname@yourbusinessURL.com.
If your budget just simply does not allow for this and you must use a free e-mail account, at least use something tamer in the name portion of the address, preferably your own name or the name of your business.
These days, you can register a URL very inexpensively and get e-mail service at the same time even without a Website. I personally like GoDaddy.com and Register.com.
What would you like to do next?