Apex Logic

I was talking to a very nice couple. They own their own business and even have a website for it. As they were presenting their business card they prefaced it with, “our e-mail will be changing soon to email@newispdomain.dom, so ignore the one on the card.”

Has this happened to you?  A business card with an e-mail scratched out or a label stuck on it over the old e-mail/website?

As we tell our clients, your e-mail and domain shoud be as consistent as as your business.

As I was speaking to that nice couple I asked how much this was going to cost them. After they told me the price of new business cards I asked how much to change newspaper ads, yellow page ads as well as notify their existing customers & vendors that send them e-mail as well. Their eyes grew big as it became obvious that they did not consider the cost of these factors in changing ISPs.

I also reminded them that the reason I was there was to do a presentation on SPAM prevention and one of my points in my presentation/handouts was if the e-mail was different from the promoted website to consider the sender a possible spammer.

So I ask the question…how many of you have a website and use a hotmail, gmail, AOL, or yahoo e-mail on our business card? If it’s a matter of not wanting to change mail service (and frankly, thanks to today’s technology you should not have to), then how about setting up a forwarding e-mail account from your web domain?

A forwarding account is very simple to setup and is not a real e-mail account that you need to manage/check. It would be a special e-mail address that simply forwards to another e-mail account.

This would create a consistent e-mail address (you@yourbusinesswebsite.dom) that no matter what you change in regards to your services (mail, hosting, ISP, etc.) your customers/vendors could always gain access to you regardless of the change.

It would also save reprinting of business cards, updating your website, changing yellowpage (and other printed) ads, and validating online directories for inconsistent data.

Oh…did I mention that you’re probably going to be mislabeled on major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for months afterward?

Lastly, why would you want a single “catchall” e-mail for personal and business mail? Do you have USPS mail from your business come to your home? Keeping track of what’s business vs. personal as well as managing spam would be a nightmare!

So here are some tips for e-mail consistency:

1. If you can keep the old e-mail address forwarding for at least a year. It will take about a year for people to remove old phone books alone, not to mention outdate vendors or customes you have infrequent dealings with.
2. Keep your old domain(s). Even if you change businesses keep you old domains if you have not sold them as they can be good leads for further and future business. Have them forward to your current/new website.
3. Have a consitent prefix (the part before the @) for e-mails. If you maintain the same prefix (jobob@) for every domain you have, then no matter where you end up e-mail wise…people shold still be able to reach you.
4. Keep your business and personal e-mail seperate. Most mail clients allow you to have mail from different accounts delivered to different mail storage points keeping the business mail records seperate.

A consitent e-mail address just makes sense. If you are moving across town you try to keep the same phone number so people can continue to reach you…why should e-mail be different?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 12:38 am and is filed under Trends, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.