Most business advice is focused on giving you the advantage, but it’s just as important to assure you’re not disadvantaging yourself in any way – one of the easiest ways to do that is to make sure you have a professional email address.
One of your first points of contact with a potential client could very well be your email address, it sits on your business card and it’s probably the first form of contact in any business or sales process. Essentially a professional email address is the shirt and tie of your online presence.
If you’ve still got the email address you created years ago, when you were at school or when you first got a broadband connection, perhaps it’s time to change. It might be fine for online shopping and social media sites, but if it doesn’t look professional then it’s not good enough for the business world. You want potential clients and contacts to take you seriously, and a poor email address has the opposite.
After all, would you attend an important meeting wearing a pair of trainers? Of course not, because that would look unprofessional and so is conducting professional services with a questionable email address. Using the email rockstar.jimmy95@email.com isn’t going to give off the greatest impression.
The best email addresses are simple combinations of your first and last name, no hobbies, no interests and definitely no nicknames. Keep it plain and simple.
There may be some of you out there, in fact probably quite a few of you, thinking that getting a simple first and last name email address isn’t going to be very easy, especially if you’ve got a name that’s common. It can be a struggle to find a good combination, but before you start adding hyphens, periods and several bizarre numbers into your email, try alternative email providers to see if you can find your desired professional email address elsewhere.
But if you’re a Smith, Johnson, or Jones for example this will be an almost impossible task and clients will understand, so if you do have a common name try adding an initial or switching the order of your names, perhaps try adding the abbreviation of your country, so for example johnsmithuk@email.com. But the most important thing is to make sure it’s easy to remember and hard for clients to mistake. If your middle name initial is the same as the last letter of your first name, or first letter of your last name, it could come across as a mistake on your part. Or even worse, someone could mistake reading it and you could miss out on a crucial email. Remember to keep your business email address professional, precise and relevant to you.
