[ad_1] Running a site often means branding it properly. The idea is to reach every nook and cranny with your site’s name, so that you’re visible to potential customers. You can inch towards this goal by setting up an email address for your own domain name. There are a surprising number of businesses that use third-party branding for email addresses, and this isn’t the most optimal choice. The good news is it’s not a hard task, and you can still use your favorite email client to boot. In this post, we’ll look at how to set up a dedicated email address for your domain. First, let’s get into why this is a crucial element for your site. Why You’d Want to Set Up a Dedicated Email Address for Your Domain As we noted, branding is important for any site. You want potential visitors, readers, and customers to notice your branding wherever they see it. Lots of times, this is a visual element, such as a logo or specific stylistic aspect. There’s another element of your branding you may not have considered before: your email address. Think about the number of emails you send day to day, and what a johnsplumbing@gmail.com address says about you. In our opinion, it sends out the following messages: You’re not taking enough care in building your online presence. You don’t have well-rounded business sense, which tells a customer you may have neglected other areas of your business too. You’re positioning your email provider as the most important factor of your business. This might seem an extreme viewpoint, but it’s one of the first things a user will see when you’re contacting them. You are making it harder for a user to find you, even if they don’t know how to get in touch with you. Let’s give you a bit more insight into what we’re talking about. In short, if your domain name doesn’t feature in your email, it’s a missed opportunity. It speaks for your vision as a business owner that you’ll let Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!, and others have prominent positioning in a primary branding area. What’s more, it doesn’t make your email address unique to your business. Your email has an indirect air of being like other email addresses. On the whole, setting up an email address for your own website domain name is a way to make you stand out. It’s an opportunity you should seize. Hosting Your Emails (And Why Your Web Server Isn’t the Best Choice) There’s an aspect of setting up a dedicated email address that warrants further discussion. Without custom branding, your emails will be hosted at one of the many different provides available. We’ve mentioned Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, and there are countless more. When you switch to custom branding using your own website domain name, it would seem ideal to host emails on your server. After all, your site is hosted on the server, and if your emails end with the domain, they should too. This, for all its base logic, isn’t the best solution. Here’s why: Emails hosted on your server will be subject to the same fundamental security as your site. This may or may not be a good thing depending on your host. Deliverability suffers a lot from hosting emails on your web server. Spam filters are also not as efficient as other dedicated tools. There’s a User Experience (UX) deficit too. Many web hosts use robust open-source solutions to manage email (such as Horde or Roundcube). Though, the UX is often set by the web hosting control panel, and it lacks compared to modern providers. While you could run this email through a more suitable Graphical User Interface (GUI), the other drawbacks don’t make it viable. Our advice is to use a dedicated provider for your email, and let them handle it. Your sanity and deliverability rates will thank you. How to Choose the Right Username or Identity For Your Email Address Before we get into the technical nature of setting up an email address for your own website domain name, let’s give you some advice on choosing a suitable username. Of course, your domain name is set, so the username is where variety, uniqueness, and creativity come in. You can set the username based on your business ethos. For example, if you’re a serious and professional company, a simple info@mybusiness.com makes sense. In contrast, if you have a quirky element to how you present, hello@mybusiness.com would work. Of course, these can be adapted based on your desires. For example, “hey”, “contact”, your name, and “inquiries” are all viable options. Our advice is to keep things specific to a certain extent, and set up multiple email addresses for different tasks. For example, you could cover payments, support, sales, and more using dedicated emails. With the advice we offer in the next section, you can route mail from each of these addresses to a central inbox, so there’s no need for multiple accounts. How to Set Up an Email Address for Your Own Website Domain Name Next up, we’ll get to the technical information on how to set up an email address for your own website domain name. Because there are myriad combinations of registrar, web host, and Content Delivery Network (CDN), we won’t give you an exact process for one of them. Instead, we’ll offer the following steps: Throughout, we’ll highlight services that may be unique, or whether you may have a different experience with a certain combination of tools. 1. Set Up a New Email Address Using Your Domain First off, you need to create an email address using your domain within your host, or with an email provider. With some hosts this is simple (or at least possible). With managed hosting providers such as Kinsta, WP Engine, and others, there’s no way to create email accounts and addresses with them. This is because of the security and performance aspects we discussed earlier. It’s functionality some hosts stay away from,
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