This quick Sunday tip will give you some advice for those of you who are still hesitating whether you should buy the domain name of your company or shop, or use it in your commercial emails (if you already have a domain name and a website).
I am always intrigued when I receive email from people I know have good businesses or shops, or even product brands and websites, but every time they send me an email they use their aol or hotmail, or gmail or yahoo email address.
Why not use your business email address whenever you send email? Why lose this unique opportunity to reinforce your business identity?
Your email address is part of your public image, so you may want to speak with your webmaster and have him configure as many email addresses as you may need. Include not only your name@domain.com or firstnamelastname@domain.com addresses but ask that "masks" be created such as commercial@domain.com, or sales@domain.com or even product@domain.com.
A mask is an email address that is resent to your mail address so you do not have to configure every email you have in your mail manager (Outlook, Mozilla, etc.) Only the one you use and the one you want others to see when you send email.
For those of you who do not have your email address configured because you did not buy your domain names, and you do not have a website, well, this is a good time for you to really start thinking about what you may be losing. It is very important that you identify the domain name/s that best relates and describe your business and buy those domains as soon as possible.
You can use Who Is? (www.whois.com) to find out available names for your website. And if the first dozen names you search for, are not available, do not worry, think of something original, and then work an online PR plan (include email communications and a basic website design) so that your customers and your audiences learn that the domain name you chose, for example, www.exclusivedesignsformoms.com is the web site of your boutique. You can buy a .com domain name for $9 nowadays.
Again, your domain name, your website, your email address is part of your brand, your image, your public presentation in the market so you want to make sure that you have control over your brand in the cyberspace, and use every available resource on the web to reinforce that presence the way you want it.
Have a great Sunday!