When you have a business, it’s not a good idea to use a free email address for communication with your clients. Some of the most common free email addresses are Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail.
Below you'll find some reasons why and the easy steps you can take to look professional and ensure your emails are delivered.
How is a free email address viewed in business?
The email address you use with your clients says something about you.
- A free email address doesn’t look professional. It is much better to have an email like this: JoeStumpf@ByReferralOnly.com than this: joes2488@sbcglobal.net.
- To some people, a free email address says: “cheap” or “he does this business on the side” or “she might not be in business very long”.
- You should be promoting your business with every email you send. Don’t you think it would be better to have YOUR company name before the .com rather than Yahoo’s or AOL’s?
- Those who use a free email address are sometimes seen as someone not embracing today’s technology.
- What is easier to remember: JoeS38845@yahoo.com or JoeS@ByReferralOnly.com ?
- What happens when your email provider decides to change things up, starts charging for their service, goes out of business, etc… You are at their mercy.
Using a free email address negatively affects email delivery.
In general, free email addresses have lower deliverability rates than email from a company’s domain name. Since anyone can get a free email address, including spammers, content filters are more likely to flag a free email address as spam than a professional email address.
More specifically, if you use a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL email address, emails sent from myClients will not be delivered.
Gmail, Yahoo and AOL have announced that they have changed their authentication policy for free accounts. This change is trying to combat spam by rejecting emails that claim to come from their server (gmail.com, yahoo.com or aol.com), but actually originate from a third party server.
What does this mean?
When a Gmail, Yahoo or AOL email address is used to send email from the myClients servers, the sent email will not be delivered to the sender because it did not come from the original server.
This is not only affecting By Referral Only Members. Email services like Constant Contact, MailChimp and Infusionsoft are telling their free email address users this same thing.
Here’s the good news…
What can I do?
It is easy and inexpensive to get a professional email address and you can do it in the next 10 minutes.
There are lots of ways to do this, but here is a fast and easy way -
1. Register your own custom domain. There are many places you can do this – one option is NameCheap (Hey! we’re cost conscious too!).
That will cost you $11/year.
2. Sign up for NameCheap’s Private Email Hosting.
That will cost you $10/year.
3. Start sending email with confidence that you look professional and your emails will have great deliverability.
Look at you go!
Update your email on file.
Click the Contact Us button at the bottom right of this screen and notify By Referral Only of your updated email address.
We'll send you an email when your account has been updated.
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