Email Marketing With A Personal Touch
We’re all familiar with the fact that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And while this sentiment is usually trotted out in self-help guides and LinkedIn posts about job interviews, it’s just as relevant to email marketing. There’s more to conveying the right message than choosing a compelling subject line – the sender’s address also plays a key role.
Many modern email programs don’t display a message’s contents until it’s been opened by the recipient, particularly on mobile devices. Some people have their inbox security settings set to block images or attachments, while others will take a cursory glance at any messages they weren’t expecting and make a split-second decision about whether or not to open them. In these scenarios, the sender only has two weapons at their disposal to persuade people a message is worth reading:
- The subject title.
- Who it was sent from.
If you received an unexpected message from gobbledygook5150@easypeasy.net, you’d probably decide it wasn’t worth reading and delete it. But if you received an unsolicited email from hello@yourfavouritebrand.com, you’d be more amenable to finding out what this reputable company had to say for itself.
This, in a nutshell, is the argument in favour of adopting personalised email accounts for any corporate communications. There’s a huge difference between a string of alphanumeric characters prefixing the @ symbol, and a familiar word like ‘sales’ or ‘hello’ – let alone a person’s name. While hello@yourfavouritebrand.com immediately sets a positive tone, johnsmith@yourfavouritebrand.com is even friendlier.
Content on the other side of the @ symbol is just as important. If you’re reliant on a third party email provider like Gmail, the email’s domain will belong to Google. And no matter which corporate prefix is chosen, the presence of a Gmail suffix will suggest one of the following things to recipients:
- a) Your business is new and hasn’t had the time to register its own email accounts yet.
- b) Your firm is somehow untrustworthy and prefers to hide behind generic contact details that are easily changed or deleted.
- c) Your staff lacks the technical know-how to organise professional email hosting.
None of these convey the positive, professional first impression essential for business communication. And then we come to the top level domain – often overlooked, but still significant. A co.uk TLD (or its abbreviated .uk derivative) indicates your company is domestic, immediately differentiating it from the Americanised .com or the frankly ambiguous .net suffix. Admittedly, if your website ends in .net, there’s a clear argument for ensuring email accounts conclude in a matching format. However, a British enterprise targeting a domestic audience should always approach anything beyond the default co.uk TLD cautiously.
Email hosting to the rescue
It’s fairly evident that your company’s email addresses should:
(a) correspond with your website, and
(b) have a proprietary suffix rather than a third-party one provided by Yahoo or Mail.
Email needs to be always accessible, and hosted by dependable third-party experts who’ll ensure people never receive error messages or bounce-backs when trying to get in touch. But how do you organise this if you’re the sort of person who struggles to set up a smart TV, or who thinks a firewall is an office safety aid? The answer is simple – ask the experts.
At UK2.NET, we don’t just sell domain names and host websites. We also provide email hosting, from initial name selection and account setup to round-the-clock technical support. Whether you’re combining email and website hosting, or simply looking to set up reliable email accounts, our services are currently available for just 50p per month. For the price of a chocolate bar, each customer receives 2GB of mailbox storage for an account capable of supporting 10MB of attachments per message. Compatible with any device including iOS and Android, our packages deliver comprehensive protection against inbound spam or malware. When a message is opened on one device, a process called automatic syncing ensures it’ll be displayed as read when you log in using another machine later on.
Expanding on the subject
Our email hosting packages are also expandable. If one address isn’t sufficient, you can set up over a hundred dedicated accounts for individual staff members or departments. And for companies planning to send or receive large volumes of mail, our Professional Email option provides 10GB of storage. It also supports attachments of up to 25MB per message, which is more than enough for batch-sending photographs or distributing large files like PowerPoint presentations. Email can be hosted in popular packages such as Thunderbird and Outlook, or viewed through UK2’s webmail portal. Accessible through any web browser, this installation-free option even includes handy features like an address book and calendar. Who needs email programs anyway?