Who is your email branding?

I want to spend a few minutes with you today about email branding.  Specifically, who are you branding with each email that you send?

If you have an email address at AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, Verizon, iCloud etc then with every email you send you are branding those companies and not yourself.

If your email address is the one provided by your company, that is at least marginally better because if you are an agent at that company you can ride on the coat tails of your company’s branding.

But in either case there is a huge issue just waiting to crush you.  And that is the answer to this question: “What happens when you leave AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, Verizon, iCloud etc?”

If you are using email provided by your company, then the question is this: “What happens when you change companies?”

Here is the issue that concerns me: None of those service providers will forward your email to your new service provider if you leave them, and if you leave your old company they will certainly not forward email to your new address at your new company.

All of those thousands of business cards that you handed out over the years, all of those ads, all of those flyers may still be in someone’s hands and they may try to contact you using the old address that’s printed on them.

And that’s only the beginning of the issue.  Take a few minutes and click over to the Fast Company Article “What Your Email Says About Your Brand” If that doesn’t send chills down your spine about your email branding, nothing will.

So, what is the solution?  It’s actually fairly simple, although the process to get it done is somewhat involved.

Follow these steps:

Step One:  Obtain a domain name that is either your name or the name of the service you provided.

Step Two:  Setup email hosting.  Here is a list of Google search results to get you started on finding a hosted email provider.

Step Three: Connect your new email account to your phone, tablet and/or computer.  In other words, learn how to check and send from your new email account.

Step Four:  Using your OLD email account, start notifying everyone that you have a new email address.

Step Five: Start using your new email account.  The only time you will use your old account is to notify people of your new account, otherwise you will only go to the old account to check for any strays that haven’y gotten the word on your new account.

Step Six:  Ask your old email provider to forward ALL incoming email (Including spam) to your new account.   That way you’ll be able to reply to any email from your new account.  Any spam that arrives can be trapped by the new account spam filter.

Ongoing step: You will never be able to completely do away with the old AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, Verizon, iCloud etc account as some people will never be able to start using your new account, so you will always have to keep checking it for “strays”.  But, going forward, you will be branding yourself and not some other company!

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, I can help you with this, for a fee.  It’s part of what I do.