In this article, we’re explaining about professional email address and its significance.
When you start your business, you have to make many small, big-impact decisions, such as choosing a domain name.
Today we are going to focus on what you have to take into account for another of those small decisions: the structure of your professional email address . I mean the address itself, but also the sender name that you want to appear by default.
Table of Contents
Why Is The Structure Of An Email Address Important?
Email is one of the most used communication tools in today’s businesses. Many times, the first contact you are going to have with clients, suppliers or collaborators is going to be through your email address. It may seem like an insignificant topic, but it is actually very important that you take care of all the details, for two main reasons:
- You want it to be easy for your contacts to point and register your email address.
- You want to make a good impression when you send a communication.
How Is An Email Address Structured?
By now, I think everyone knows that an email address consists of two parts separated by the @ symbol (aroba): on the one hand, the address, and on the other the corresponding domain. Therefore, the email address name.lastname@yourcompany.com refers to the address “firstname. lastname” within the domain “yourcompany.com”.
As I already wrote in the blog about choosing the domain name for your company or your online business, in this post I am going to focus mainly on the address section .
In addition, as each email is usually configured with a sender name , we will also analyze how to optimize that description.
Choosing Your Professional Email Address
Let’s first look at the case of the email addresses of the people who work in your company. Then we will be interested in the generic addresses for information, help, customer service, orders, newsletters, etc .
Structure Of A Professional Email Address For A Person
Typically, companies choose an address based on the person’s first name, with the most frequent options being the first and last names, initials, or just the first name.
Full Name
Using the full name, for example in my case “antoine.kerfant” or “antoine kerfant” has the advantage of making it clear to the other person who their contact is , even in situations in which the sender’s name does not appear: for example , if they ask for your email during a phone conversation. But it also has several drawbacks. If you have a weird or foreign name (like mine), it can get tedious to spell the email.
Giving your full name can also pose a privacy issue . It is not the same to be called José García than to have an unusual name, which anyone could investigate. And, if that is not a problem when you already publicly communicate your name, as is my case, it can mean giving too much information about people when it is not necessary for their name to be known.
Initials
Using initials has the main advantage of making the email address much shorter, easier to remember and spell , as well as not revealing much information about people when it is not strictly necessary. In my case, my main address simply starts with “ak” followed by the domain name.
The downside is when you have more than one person with the same initials in your company, a fairly common case.
Name
Many modern companies, especially startups, choose to use only the name in the email address. It is a solution that is committed to simplicity, in addition to generating a feeling of closeness with contacts. It is a small detail, but it seems less formal and more friendly if María writes me instead of María López.
The downside is that in some names are repeated a lot, and not just José and María, so it is usually only valid for small organizations.
Other Information About The Structure Of The Email Address
Of course you can make combinations . Some companies choose to combine the initial of the first name with the full last name, or vice versa.
Another element to take into account is whether symbols such as hyphens or periods are used to separate the words. In my opinion, when you choose to put first and last name, the cleanest thing is to separate them by a period. For the other options, you probably don’t want to include any separation.
Choose The Email Address For Specific Functions
Information Request
The most common is to use the prefix ” info “, and many of the companies choose that option. However, it comes at a cost. The robots that are dedicated to spam usually send emails by default to the address info@yourcompany.com. But the same happens with other common prefixes such as ” contact ” or the like.
In recent years, the use of the prefix ” hello ” has become popular . The idea is similar to what I mentioned before using just the name. A more informal and closer contact is created.
Newsletters And Communications
Businesses use all kinds of prefixes for their communications. They can be the same ones that we have commented on before (info, hello) or the classic ” noreply ” that makes it very clear that no response to the email is expected. The uses of ” communication “, ” bulletin “, ” newsletter ” as well as the name of the company are also frequent .
Orders
If you receive online orders, you may be interested in having a specific email address to receive the related emails, so that they are not lost among the rest of the communications. Between requests for information, spam and other messages, it is very common for the mailbox of a company account to become saturated.
Choose Sender Name
When you send an email to your contacts, the first thing they will see is not your address, but the sender’s name that you have configured when defining the structure of your email. Therefore, it is important to stop for a second to get it right.
- Indicate your name and surname . It is the most common, and probably the most advisable. Set the record straight and your contacts will have no doubt who they are talking to.
- Put your name and the name of the company . Businesses do it a lot lately, especially for customer service. Again it is to create that closeness with the contact.
- Check the current settings. If you don’t do anything, it probably shows up as the sender of your email address, and it doesn’t look very good. Better take a few seconds to check it out.
