Brand Your Email Address to Boost Your Professional Image

Do you brand your email address? Sure, I know it seems like a small thing, but consider the professional touch. Sometimes the thought of putting together a personal brand can be overwhelming. There are so many things to consider and do, including creating a logo, taking professional photographs, starting and maintaining a blog, building a web site,updating your LinkedIn profile, posting on Facebook, and a hundred other details and tasks to create the perfect image of you. With all that, where do you start?

How about taking a look at your email address? Does yours enhance your brand? Or does it subtly undermine your message?

I know this sounds trivial, but think about it. Your email address appears on every message you send on the internet, it’s on your resume, your business cards, and just about anywhere else you can imagine. In fact, since you also use it to log into many accounts, your email address has become your de facto internet identification card.

Look at it from a different perspective. Your email address (combined with the subject) is the first thing that anyone sees when they open a message from you.

Thus, the very first impression received by potential employers, clients and vendors is created by your email address.

Your address has two parts.

1. To the left of the @ sign is the domain name. HOTMAIL.COM, AOL.COM, GMAIL.COM and RICHARDLOWE.COM are all domain names. This is actually the name which identifies an email server, but it also says something about you. We’ll get into that in a minute.
2. To the right is the username or account name. This identifies you. Technically, it is the name of a mailbox on an email server, but that’s really not important for our discussion.

Let’s begin with the domain name. What does this say about you? Let’s take some examples.

AOL.COM, COMPUSERVE.COM, and similar names – If you still are using an AOL account, you’ve almost certainly been on the internet for a long time. At least that’s the perception, and when many people see AOL.COM in the email address, they think “old” or “unwilling to change”.

RR.COM, BRIGHTHOUSE.COM or any other internet provider email domain name – These kind of names may be interpreted as unsophisticated or even lazy. You can’t even get a GMAIL or OUTLOOK account?

GMAIL.COM and OUTLOOK.COM – These are barely acceptable as it doesn’t really produce any thought at all. Lots of people have them, and no one thinks much about them.

yourname.COM (or .ORG, .GURU or whatever) – This brands you as YOU, name makes a subtle but distinct statement that you understand the power of your name and you know what you are doing.

yourcompanyname.COM – Using your company domain states you are part of an organization and you represent that organization. This hides your personal brand unless the company name IS your personal brand.

You can choose from hundreds of different domain suffixes (the .COM portion of the domain name), including .GURU, .PHOTOGRAPHY, .DESIGN, .SHOP and so on. Using one of these suffixes can add additional reinforcement to your brand. For example, RICHARDLOWE.PHOTOGRAPHY brands Richard Lowe as being in the photography industry and RICHARDLOWE.HEALTHCARE brands as being in the healthcare industry.

I came up with two domain names, one to represent my personal brand and the other my business.

RICHARDLOWE.COM – I use this for personal communications, and it reinforces my brand every time someone reads one of my email messages.

THEWRITINGKING.COM – When I communication about business, this is the domain that I use. This is a powerful brand, the king of writing, and when I use this email I am saying I’m part of the organization that produces excellent results.

It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the specifics about how to set this up, especially as the details will be different for every email provider and domain name company. However, many domain providers, such as Siteground, include working email accounts. You can work with their help desk to get it all going.

Brand Your Email Address For a Professional Touch

Once you’ve got it set up, every time someone looks at your email address they will see your personal or company brand. Congratulations! This is how you brand your email address.

By the way, you can set up your new email account to read the emails sent to your old one. This way messages from anyone who hasn’t gotten the word about your new email address will still get to your inbox. Again, the help desk at your domain or email provider will help you set this up.

Finally, use your domain name for your web site to further reinforce your branding.

Richard Lowe Jr

Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.