A professional email account is a must if you are serious about your real estate investing business.
In this article, we’ll be talking about why you shouldn’t use free email accounts like Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, Comcast, etc. for your business email. Instead, I’ll show you how to set up a professional email account for your real estate investing business that will include your domain name (like yourname.com).
Let me ask you a question.
Suppose a real estate agent gave you their business card. You notice that the email address on the card is something like becky_doglover10362@comcast.net. How would that affect your impression of this person as a professional?
Some people wouldn’t think much of it, but for many people, it would plant a seed of doubt in their mind about this person’s level of professionalism and experience.
Usually, a business will have a professional email address at the domain name of the company. For example, let’s say that a real estate agent’s business card had an email address like rebecca@hometownrealty.com.
Do you see the difference?
As a real estate investor, you especially need to pay attention to this. Why?
Because people tend to be skeptical of real estate investors anyway. Especially when you’re dealing with motivated sellers. But really, lots of people you may need to do business with don’t understand real estate investing, and they may have even had bad experiences with them in the past. There are lots of wanna-be investors out there who give investors a bad reputation.
So you need to do all you can to come across as professional. Having a professional email account is a simple thing you can do to build credibility. It shows you’re at least somewhat serious about your business because you’ve taken a few minutes to set up a professional email account.
Maybe you haven’t thought about it before, or you just don’t know how to go about it.
Generally, you have to pay for email at your domain name, but it’s usually not very expensive, about $5/month per email address. If that $5 makes the difference between someone trusting you or not, wouldn’t that be worth it?
Here Are Some Professional Email Account Services
My favorite service for this is Google. They have a service where you can set up email through your own domain name. On your end, it’s exactly like using a Gmail account. In fact, you can log in at gmail.com if you want. So it works exactly like Gmail, but no else sees that. They just see that it’s a professional email account. I’ve gotten used to how Gmail works and I’ve found them to be pretty reliable when it comes to my messages coming through.
Get email at your domain name through Google
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If you’re technologically challenged, you might want to get an email account where you get your domain name. For example, GoDaddy and Name Cheap offer email accounts too. There are fewer settings involved if you get your email where you got your domain. But if you use Google’s service, they will walk you through the steps. There are just a couple settings you’ll need to change where you got your domain name to point your mail to Google’s service.
Should I use free email accounts that come with my web hosting account?
Maybe you have a hosting account somewhere for your website and it includes free email accounts at your domain name. Should you use that? No, usually not. Why?
Because there is a good chance emails you send won’t make it to people. Even if it works when you first set it up, sooner or later you’ll probably run into issues. Here’s why.
When you use your web hosting company for email, you’re typically on a shared server, where many other people are sharing the same machine with you. All it takes is for one of those hundreds of people to send out some spam email, or even for their website to get hacked (which is very common), and everyone who shares that machine will get their emails blocked from all the major email services. I’ve had this happen numerous times. I’d be sending out emails and nobody was getting them. It doesn’t matter that you never send out spam emails. Because you’re sharing a server with hundreds, if not 1000+, people, you’re lumped in with them.
So you’re usually better off paying for an email service.
I’ve been using Google for my business email for many years, and I’ve been happy with it. Occasionally something important ends up in my Spam folder, which will happen anywhere, but generally, that doesn’t happen.
Another important benefit of using email at your own domain name is that you don’t have to worry about your email address changes.
For example, let’s say you’re using a free email account that comes with your internet provider. We’ll just say you’re using Verizon. So you have an email account that is yourname12345@verizon.net. But then you switch internet companies and start using Comcast. Now your email is yourname12345@comcast.net. All the people who had your email address before won’t know your new email address. But if you have email at your domain name, you can keep the email account as long as you want. Even if you switch email services, you can keep the same domain name.
For example, I used to have my email set up with my hosting company. I switched hosting companies multiple times and just set up the email account on each new service. Then I started using Google’s mail service. Despite all these changes, my email address stayed the same. I’ve had the same email address for over 12 years.
One final option, if you really want to set up email at your domain but you have a budget of $0, is Zoho. They have a free option for setting up email at your domain. I haven’t had the best success with their free email service. In the past, I’ve used it for clients and they had issues with their emails not getting through, or with them being very slow, sometimes taking hours to come through. I would only use them as a last resort. If you have to go that route, plan on upgrading to Google as soon as you can afford it.
Get email at your domain name through Google
Disclosure:
Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. However, we recommend these services because we use them and have had good success with them so far. You don’t have to use our links, but we’re a small business and this helps us offset our costs, so we appreciate it.
Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. However, we recommend these services because we use them and have had good success with them so far. You don’t have to use our links, but we’re a small business and this helps us offset our costs, so we appreciate it.