Why It's Important to Have a Branded Email for Your Small Business

It's time to get serious about your online marketing, which means you'll need a branded email. Your company's image is crucial to your success, but you don't need a fancy logo or extravagant business cards. Instead, focus on some of the smaller things. Many of these things add up and bring a sense of cohesion and trust to your brand.

One of these small things you should focus on is branded emails. Not only will these emails say a lot about your brand, but they're also relatively easy and inexpensive to set up.

What Can Branded Emails Do for My Business?

Before we get into setting up a branded email, let's go over why they are so important. First and foremost, they build brand awareness.

A branded email is great because it associates you with your company, which is something a personal email does not do. Branding is all about bringing all the elements of your brand together in a consistent and cohesive way.

In order to be the most successful, people need to be able to instantly recognize your business. When you use a branded email address, your email matches your website, and your website matches your business. When all of these things are related to one another, it gives people a sense of comfort.

As a small business owner, you most likely wear a lot of different hats, which means it's crucial to stay organized. Many small business owners might take care of marketing, customer service, collections, and other jobs.

It's essential to create a workspace for your business email to separate work life from personal life. This way, all of your work emails are in one place, and all of your personal emails are in another. No one likes going through a seemingly never-ending inbox looking for one specific email. If you don't have a separate workspace, you'll be going through both business and personal emails, which just makes the job take that much longer.

You can even further organize yourself by creating separate email addresses for different areas of your company, such as support@, orders@, billing@, and so on.

How to Get a Branded Email

While it's not that difficult to get a branded email, it's essential to choose the right provider. There are several different services that can do this for you, but some of them have issues with spam, deliverability, and hard-to-use interfaces.

An alternative solution to this is using your website host for "free" email service. However, there are issues that come along with this, and while it may seem tempting, we don't recommend it as the pros don't outweigh the cons. When using your website host, you may experience problems like bounced emails, and if you ever decide to change hosts, it can be super expensive and difficult to do.

One excellent option, however, is Google's G Suite. G Suite uses an email interface that you are most likely used to already: Gmail, which makes learning how to use your email super easy. Even if you haven't used Gmail before, learning how to use their platform will be a breeze.

G Suite also comes with a plethora of tools to help you manage your business, such as Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and more. Each of these tools are linked to your email address, and it's easy to share these documents with your team through your business account.

While all of these things are awesome, it's not free. G Suite's Business Starter plan will cost you $6 per email address, per month. This is the plan we recommend for most small businesses.

While this price tag may come as a shock because most people are used to email being free, it's definitely worth it. Not only do you get a custom and secure branded email, but a bunch of functionality and storage as well. Not sure if G Suite is right for you? All of their plans feature a free 14-day trial.

Signing Up for G Suite

If you decide to use G Suite for your branded email, the first step is signing up here. Like it was mentioned before, each plan comes with a free 14-day trial, so if you find that it's not the right choice for your business, you can easily cancel your account.

Setting up your account is laid out in steps. Still, there are some technical parts that might be a little difficult for some people, such as domain verifications and records. While Google will provide you with the documentation to do this, if you're unfamiliar with adding records to your domain, it might be a little intimidating.

If you need help setting up your account, you can reach out to us!

Takeaway

Having a branded email not only shows off your professionalism but also provides a sense of trust, helps increase brand awareness, and helps you stay organized. Sometimes it's the little things like this that make all the difference in the continued growth and success of your business.

If you decide it's time to switch over to a branded email, make sure you update all of your digital and physical marketing material, including business cards, brochures, etc.

Other Helpful Articles:

• Tips for Growing Your Email List
• A Guide to Writing Newsletters