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Most of a branding budget goes on the logo. Then the card gets handed over with a Gmail address on it.
The logo is the part people look at. The email address is the part people use. It is on every quote, every invoice, every reply, sitting in the From line before anyone has read a word you wrote. It is the most-seen piece of a small business identity and usually the least thought about.
Does a free email address really matter?
Yes, and in one specific way: it tells people how permanent you are.
An address at gmail.com, yahoo.com or hotmail.com reads as an account somebody opened for themselves and started using for work. Often that is exactly what happened, and for a side project nobody minds. But put that address on a five-figure quote, next to a competitor writing from their own domain, and you are the one who looks like they might not be here next year.
There is a practical cost too. Send business mail in volume from a consumer account and you have no control over how it is authenticated, which is one of the things spam filters weigh.
You own your domain. You do not own your Gmail address
This is the part that matters most and gets mentioned least.
An address on a free provider is yours until it is not. Accounts get locked, suspended, and occasionally closed by an automated system with no one to appeal to, and when that happens you lose the address, the archive, and every way anyone had of reaching you.
An address on your own domain is a different arrangement. The domain is yours. The mail provider is a service you rent, and you can change it in an afternoon without telling a single client, because the address goes with you.
If you already have a website you already own a domain. The mail half is usually sitting there unused.
What goes before the @
Say it out loud, down a phone line, to somebody writing it on a notepad. If you have to spell it twice, it is the wrong address.
Take a name like Jonathan Broussard. These all work, in roughly this order:
- jonathan@ — the clearest option when the domain already carries the surname or the business name. Nothing is repeated and there is nothing to spell.
- hello@ — not a name at all, and that is the point. It survives you. If somebody else ever answers your mail they can answer this one without pretending to be you.
- jonathanbroussard@ — unambiguous, slightly long to dictate.
- jonathan.broussard@ — the corporate default. Fine, but the dot is one more thing to explain out loud.
- jbroussard@ — short, at the cost of “was that J for Jonathan or James?”
The ones to avoid on a one-person business are info@, admin@ and sales@. They imply a department that does not exist, and they are the first addresses every scraper on the internet tries.
Four rules for the address itself
Short enough to say once. A long first name can be shortened — Jon for Jonathan is fine. A nickname is not: Jonny reads as a personal account, which is the thing you are getting away from.
No accents or special characters. This matters more here than most places, because half of south Louisiana has an accent in their surname. Not every mail server handles them reliably, and nobody can dictate one over the phone. Drop the accent in the address and keep it everywhere else.
No numbers. A number in an address reads as “the version of my name that was still available”, which is exactly the impression you are paying a domain to avoid.
Do not encode your job or your city. You will see jbroussardcpa@ and jonathanlafayette@ recommended, and they do read as professional. The problem shows up later: change careers or move towns and your email address is now wrong, on every card, invoice and signature you have ever sent. Put the job title in the signature, where it costs nothing to edit.
Use aliases instead of more mailboxes
An alias is another address that lands in the mailbox you already have. No second password, no second app, no checking two inboxes.
Two things this buys you.
The first is structure without overhead. bookings@, billing@ and press@ can all arrive in one place and be filed on the way in, so the mail is sorted before you have read any of it.
The second is control. Give every service its own alias — one for your accountant software, one for the supplier portal, one for the newsletter you half want — and when one of them starts producing spam you know exactly who sold your address, and you switch that one address off. Your real address never moves.
Do the visuals still matter?
They do, and they are the easier half. A mark, a typeface, two or three colours, used the same way on the site, the invoice and the proposal. Consistency is doing most of the work; novelty is doing almost none.
The place this falls over is the email signature. A 400-pixel logo, four social icons and a legal disclaimer look worse than three lines of plain text, and several of those elements arrive as attachments or broken images on the recipient end. Name, what you do, one link, one number. That is the whole signature.
Setting it up
- Use the domain you already have. If you have a site, this step is done.
- Pick a provider that supports custom domains. Most paid mail hosts do; most free ones do not.
- Point the MX records at the provider. They give you the values and it is a copy-and-paste job at your registrar.
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Your provider will walk you through it. Skip this and your mail is more likely to land in spam, which looks worse than the Gmail address ever did.
- Forward the old address for a few months while you tell people, then stop forwarding. A cutover nobody notices is the goal.
The whole thing is an evening, once.
If you get partway through and it stops making sense, reach out through the form and I will walk you through it. Step four is where most people stop, and it is the quickest part to do for somebody. I would love to help.
What I use
Fastmail. It handles custom domains and aliases properly, it is paid rather than ad-supported, and it has been around long enough that I am not worried about it disappearing. That last part matters more than any feature list when the thing in question is where your business mail lives.
Set up an address on your own domain with Fastmail.
The short version
If you do one thing to your brand this month, do not redraw the logo. Move your email onto your own domain. It costs less than a logo, it takes an evening, and it is the piece of your identity that every client sees every time they hear from you.
And if the email is one piece of a bigger job — the site, the brand, the whole picture — that is what I do. Send it through the contact form.
