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Do you have a domain, brand, or business? A well-chosen email address at your custom domain can become an exciting part of the message of your brand – yet all too few brands will tap this method of personalization.
You never have to accept the mundane like info@domain.com. It’s much easier than you think to come up with snappy addresses which pro-actively communicate the feel of your brand to your customers.
This article is for business at any stage, not just those setting up their business email for the first time. It’s a lot easier than you might ever think to change over email addresses within your existing business domain while never missing subsequent emails coming in at your current addresses, and I’ll show you how to handle that part of it too.
Step 1: Think up new email addresses to for your role-based tasks
This part is the fun part, so enjoy! The best way to accomplish this step is to have a clear idea of what role you’re filling for each address at your business.
Alternatives to info@
First let’s tackle the initial contact and/or catch-all email address for your domain. Most companies default to info@domain.com for this. Ask yourself what is the role of this account? The answer will be something closer to what you’ll want, but feel free to brainstorm further. For example, as a first contact, hello@domain.com could work fine. It sounds friendly and approachable. There are plenty of other options, for example welcome@domain.com or greetings@domain.com. For this process, an online thesaurus is your friend. Use it!
Taking it a step further, this address can even become a play on words if you’d like. For example, a business selling Renaissance wear could opt to use hail@domain.com
OK, let's move on to alternatives to other roles at your brand.
First though, if you haven't yet set up a mailing list, you'll want to do it now. Maybe you want to send a special welcome email to those who have newly signed up for a newsletter. Or perhaps your aim is to guide people toward purchasing a product or course that your company sells.
For any of those things, you'll want to have a group email provider that can handle complex situations, such as multi-step emails, funneling, and so on. Many businesses use popular but pricey options such as ConvertKit, Aweber or Mailchimp which can quickly become unaffordable. Rest assured there is no need to spend lots of money on this! You can get excellent features at a low price point at Moosend, and I highly recommend them. They're reliable, cheaper than any of the previous options I mentioned, easy to use, and packed with a ton of features. For 2 more options similar to Moosend, I recommend Sender.net - besides email it allows you to do SMS and MMS messaging. You may also like to take a look at SendX.io, it's also affordable and packed with features you want.
Alternatives to sales@
This is the email address you really want to change the most. That’s because sales@domain.com isn’t so user-friendly. To the customer it sounds like asking to be parted with their hard-earned money. Even if that’s what the customer is actually seeking to do, you want to focus on the end result of what your company delivers to your customer as opposed to the job title of the employee at that email account.
Simply think about what it is that you company delivers, and make the email address be that.
- For example, if your business builds up social media accounts for others, then you might go with popularity@domain.com
- Another great example is if you offer self-help classes for busy people to reclaim a little sanity, you could go with happier@domain.com
See? It’s fun.
Alternatives to scheduling@
This will depend on your business and what you’re scheduling, but some warmer-sounding alternatives are:
- meet@domain.com
- together@domain.com
- visit@domain.com and so on.
Customer support: Alternatives to support@ or service@
Customer service or support is one area where you may not necessarily need to change the address. Depending on your type of business, many users are familiar with and have a high level of trust in addresses such as support@domain.com or service@domain.com . Depending on your field, going with something else may even confuse the customer.
Still, if you’d like to go with something a little different for this role-based address, go for a user-friendly email address like care@domain.com, help@domain.com (or helpme@domain.com).
- For technical support, a more specialist-sounding role like guru@domain.com may even inspire more trust in your customer than support@… or service@…
Step 2: Run your ideas through this checklist
After you come up with some ideas, you’ll want to make sure the email address is:
- Short
- Easy to spell
- Pronounceable. If you speak the address over the phone, the person ought to be able to write it down from that.
- Has few or no variants, and be aware of the variants. Variants are fine but be sure keep any of these in mind for our next step. (e.g. plurals vs singular; common misspellings like stationery vs stationary).
- Fits in with your brand’s message in general. In particular, consider whether it could sound spammy when taken the wrong way. For example, if you run a traditional financial planning company, you don’t want an address like getrich@domain.com. To check if you have a good fit with your brand’s message, consider bouncing ideas off a select group of people you trust – they may come up with even better ideas for your email address for you!
Step 3: Tying up any loose ends
There are a few technical tips to remember:
Set up email forwarding from the old address to the new one
Sounds obvious, but make sure this task doesn’t fall through the cracks. If you plan to switch e.g. from an existing info@domain.com to a new hello@domain.com, set up your email forwarding accordingly so that subsequent emails directed to info@domain.com will be forwarded to the new address hello@domain.com.
Set up forwarding so that spelling variants of the new address go to the new address
For example, if you have stationery@domain.com , you’ll also want to go ahead and set up forwarding so that anything directed to the miss-spelled stationary@domain.com will forward to the first one, since many people don’t know how to spell “stationery”. You won’t need to think of every possible variant or touch-type miss-spelling: just go for the really obvious ones.
If you’re worried about variants as an issue in general, consider setting up a "catch-all" rule for which address at your company to forward any mail for your domain that doesn’t correspond to an existing address.
Test out any forwarding
Make sure you test out your system by sending test emails to the old or variant addresses. Check to be sure you see these in the new email account.
Update your site
Again, this task is surprisingly easy for everyone to assume it’s someone else’s job! Make sure that role-based email addresses are updated on your website. Triple-check your "About us", "Contact us" and "Our team" pages, and any others where you expect to have contact email addresses published. Remember, as per the previous step you can rest secure in the knowledge that so long as you’ve set up your mail forwarding appropriately, it’ll take care of any email addresses that get missed when updating the site.
The bottom line
Your choice of email addresses can act to make a wonderful impact on your brand’s message. Enjoy creating exciting role-based email addresses for your business! The tutorial above shows how you can do this yourself for free in a few easy steps.
