Jeff Shamus, CEO, AllClients LLC – June 2014
If you have a small business, it’s not a good idea to use a free email address, like one from Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail. There are several old reasons for this, and now couple new ones to add to the list.
Here are some of the old reasons…
Old Reason 1: 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”.
Old Reason 2: 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?
Old Reason 3: 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 catch a free email address than one at your own website domain.
Old Reason 4: A free email address doesn’t look very professional. Much better to have an email like this: jeff@allclients.com than this: jeffsh2488@sbcglobal.net.
Old Reason 5: Those who use a free email address are sometimes seen as someone not embracing today’s technology. You can be all set up, today, with a professional email address for less than $2 a month (keep reading!)
Old Reason 6: What is easier to remember: Jeffsha38845@yahoo.com or jeff@allclients.com?
Old Reason 7: 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.
…and now for the new reasons…
New Reason 1: Yahoo announced in April 2014 that they were changing their authentication policy that will greatly affect the deliverability of all Yahoo email. Yahoo is trying to combat spam by rejecting emails that claim to come from Yahoo.com, but actually originate from non-Yahoo servers.
At this time, this affects only people with email addresses from yahoo (jeff23344@yahoo.com). (Please see New Reason 2 below)
So when someone with a yahoo address sends email from the AllClients servers, it will disappear or bounce because it didn’t come from a Yahoo server.
New Reason 2: A few weeks after Yahoo made their announcement, AOL followed suit. So now emails from @AOL.com addresses will not be delivered either.
The other free email service providers like Gmail and Hotmail are likely to follow suit soon.
And by the way…
This is not a problem just for AllClients Customers. The Aweber’s and Constant Contact’s of the world are having to tell their “free email address customers” this same thing.
Here’s the good news…
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 – we use NameCheap https://www.namecheap.com/ (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. https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email.aspx
3. Send out an email to everyone in your address book and give them your new professional email address.
Look at you go!
