10 + 1 Tips for Email

Here are 10+1 top tips for email for small businesses:

Buy a domain. Even if you use it for nothing but email it will give you a better image.
Don't use your ISPs email address. It looks unprofessional and locks all of your advertising to your ISP.
Hosting a domain for email only costs a few pounds a year.
Make sure that a good spam filter is included.
It is often desirable to have several email addresses for your business for example This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it These can be individually collected by email clients or be forwarded to another account or be aliases of the main account This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Be very careful forwarding email to ISP accounts. It is a good way to get your domain blocked. AOL is notorious for blocking email at the drop of a hat.
If you want to send a single email to lots of people do not put all of the addresses in the To field in your email client. It is much better to put all the addresses in the BCC field and your own address in the To field. That way each recipient only sees their own address and yours. You don't give away your entire client list.
If you regularly send emails to a large number of people such as a newsletter it isn't safe to send from your account. Your ISP's terms of use probably don't allow it and it is very easy to get email from your domain blocked. Use an email marketing service instead. They take care of problems with being blocked and maintain your contact list as well and you will be able to send personalised emails.
It isn't a great idea to display your email address on your website because spammers will harvest it and you will get more spam. Much better to have a contact form.
If you are often away from your office a Blackberry can be a great solution. A Blackberry can collect email from 10 accounts and has lots of great features as well as being a great phone.

Bonus tip.

Have you noticed that big companies try to appear small and small companies try to appear bigger than they are?

If your company is going to grow in size be aware that the form of your email addresses can become a problem if you don't think ahead.

It is important to have email addresses which follow a predictable pattern so that someone that only knows your name can guess your email address.

Often people start with a small number of general email addresses: info@, sales@, support@, accounts@ etc. These don't give anything away about the size of your organisation and aren't tied to an individual. These general addresses give the impression that you are bigger than you might actually be and if Sarah who does your accounts gets run over by a bus you don't have to notify all of your clients that John now performs that function.

If you are starting out small but intend to grow avoid the use of first names or initials for email addresses. Sarah@ or sj@ might be alright for a while but eventually you will have a name collision and the email naming convention will break down.

Sometimes companies use initial followed by last name for example: jsmith@ for John Smith. Eventually there will be a name collision which isn't great.

The scheme which works pretty well for quite large organisations is firstname.lastname@ so John Smith would have john.smith@. You could use '_' instead of '.' but it doesn't show well when the email address is underlined.

If you use this form of email address from the start you will have fewer problems as you grow and it doesn't look like you are small.

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