What does your email address say about you? Part TWO

In August 2008 I wrote a very brief blog post entitled, “What does your email address say about you?” You can go there and read (if you like)…but the quick and dirty on it is this: 3 researchers from the University of Leipzig conducted some research to determine any correlations between an individual’s personality and their email address. Well, not their entire email address…just the first part of it (AKA: the local-part). Now, almost a year and a half later, here I am talking about the “other” part of the email address – the hostname. And, I am asking the same question, “What does your email address say about you?”

First and foremost, I am a marketer and I am looking at this topic from a marketing perspective. So, maybe a better question to ask is, “What does your email address say about your business?”

The fact of the matter is that the typical email user does not care about the technical aspects of mail delivery. Most do not even commit your email address to memory. And why should they? Our email clients auto-fill addresses, we all have digital address books, and we reply to more email than we generate.  So, other than ensuring proper delivery to the intended recipient, does an email address have any significance at all? I would say that it does, especially for those of us in business.

On my desk is a stack of business cards I collected from a trade show. There are 53 cards in that stack to be exact. All of those cards have the person’s email address clearly printed alongside their contact information. The general construct of those email addresses are some variation of their first and last names for the local-part and then followed by their business domain for the hostname. We’ve come to expect that as standard practice for business email, right? Well, there is this ONE card in that stack that is different. This company chose to use their business name as the local-part and “Hotmail.com” as their hostname. Their business card is of equal weight as the others. It shares the same aesthetic qualities as the rest. However, there is a drain on its legitimacy because the email address does not match their company URL. I know it may seem minor. But, from a marketing perspective this is a lost opportunity to remind these potential customers of your brand.

Your brand is the image of your product or service in the market. Your brand image is both experiential and psychological. The market experiences your brand through the products and services you provide. But, the market also engages your brand expecting that it will align with all the advertising muscle you’ve put behind it. The last thing you want your brand to do is suffer. Given the fact that email remains the most critical application for small-to-mid sized businesses, why would we not make every effort to ensure that our email address is part of our brand management strategy?

So, what does your email address say about you? Better yet…what does it say about your brand management?

Hopefully it says good things. My random collection of cards shows that 52 out of 53 businesses are doing it right. But, what if your business is like the one mentioned earlier? What should you do? The good news is that it is a fairly simple fix. All you need is an email server.

Email servers vary as much in function as they do in price. If brand management is your primary objective then remember that you do not need a beast of a machine and you do not need to spend a lot of money to get yourself up and going. One FREE solution is IMail Express. It handles all of your email, supports up to 10 users, and runs on modest hardware.

Having an email server, whether it is a hosted solution or something you maintain in your office, should not intimidate you. Most vendors have taken their time to think about their customer’s needs and to create very intuitive administrative controls. Not to mention, in the case of IMail Express, for just $99.00 you can have access to 12 months of unlimited technical support.

Bringing this back to your brand…with little-to-no out of pocket expense you can quickly adjust your brand management strategy to include the use of your business’ email hostname. This increases the subtle psychological impact of your brand and brings you one step closer to setting the proper expectations for your product or service.