It is vital that you set up an email address for your business, so customers, clients and suppliers can contact you easily online. If you have created a website for your firm and registered its domain name, which Turner Little can help you with, the process of creating one business email is fairly routine.
But as your enterprise expands, you may need to set up more addresses. These may be generic emails e.g. sales@yourcompany.com or addresses for specific individuals in the office, so they can carry out their work more effectively. Managing this portfolio of email addresses can prove complex. Business leaders suggest that you use the following options when managing your firm’s email address portfolio.
Use shared inboxes
Messages sent to generic emails can be received via shared inboxes. It is advisable to develop emails with generic prefixes such as “sales,” “accounts” and “info,” e.g. sales@yourcompanyname.com, so you can refine your online correspondence infrastructure. With shared inboxes all employees in the relevant department view the message, increasing the chances that it will be acted upon.
By using shared inboxes, your managers will be also be able to track all online correspondence in their departments. This means that they can both monitor employee performance more effectively and assess customer sentiments, allowing them to refine your business’ sales and marketing strategies. When using shared inboxes, we would advise you to use a set process, e.g. flagging and colouring coding messages when they are read and acted upon, to ensure all emails are dealt with quickly.
Add a personal element
We should note that you can also re-direct messages sent to generic emails to personal inboxes across your firm. This strategy ensues that all messages are acted upon, but allows for a greater degree of flexibility. Basically, the person in question establishes an ‘alias’ e.g. accounts@yourcompany.com, meaning that they can temporarily take responsibility for all messages sent to this account. But as your firm changes, you can divert this address to other employees.
Liven up addresses
Email addresses can double-up as branding tools, promoting your business to consumers. Instead of using standard prefixes such as “sales” for generic emails, use something more exciting which communicates your brand ideals to consumers, such as amazingdesigners@yourcompany.com. The effectiveness of this strategy depends on your industry. If you work in accountancy, you need to project seriousness, so it would not be appropriate. But if you operate within a creative sector, a livelier generic prefix could set you apart from your competition.
Utilise personal protocols
In order to take a comprehensive approach, why not set up personal email protocols? This would allow consumers to send messages to generic emails, yet receive responses from named members of your team. With this strategy, you can provide your customers with consistency and give them the means to determine other individual staff email addresses. Say an employee called Brenda works in your sales department. With personal protocols, she can answer emails sent to sales@yourcompany.com via her brenda@yourcompany.com address.
There are several approaches you can take. You can use just the staff member’s first name, followed by the company domain, as in the example above. This can be beneficial, as it provides the personalisation needed to make consumers feel valued, but can prove problematic as your company grows, should you hire more people with the same first name. Alternatively, you could use the worker’s full name, e.g. brenda.thompson@yourcompany.com. This can be advantageous if your firm focuses on business-to-business, as it projects an air of professionalism.
Find the right strategy
The key to managing your firm’s email address portfolio successfully is common sense. Look at all of the options listed in this article and ask yourself, how can we utilise these methods to ensure that the right messages are viewed by the appropriate member or members of staff? By finding the right email management strategy, you could ensure that your employees’ stay on top of correspondence, so that you company can operate seamlessly, without wasting operating capital.
Turner Little
Turner Little was founded in 1998 and it has since become a well-established UK based professional Company Registration Agent, Registered Bank Intermediaries and Business Consultants, as well as Trust provider. You can receive our monthly newsletter by signing up using the form below.
