B2B Email Strategies

In business, one has to stand out from the crowd to be successful. One has to be consistent and memorable as well.  All too often however, little things like the format and consistency of email addresses are overlooked in the promotional element of the 'grand Marketing Plan'.  NBS can help you avoid some of the pitfalls.

Firstly, you do have a 'proper' domain address don't you?  What's that got to do with email strategies? You ask!

A lot.  There are essentially two types of domain.  The type that is offered at little or no cost as part of an ISP's service - usually in the form of http://www.serviceprovider'sname.mydomain.co.uk and the type of domain bought and registered to yourself in the form of http://www.mydomain.co.uk.  

In the first case, the domain is effectively owned by your service provider and will be lost, together with all its hard-won promotion to search engines if you change ISP.  In the latter case, you own the domain, and can move it from ISP to ISP or from Host to Host without your customers (or search engines) being aware of the change.  Furthermore, the former muddles your identity with that of your ISP, in the latter case it doesn't.

The implications for email are simple.  Even for a small business, allying your email address to a 'proper' domain name has distinct merits.  There is more however.  

Most ISP's and Web Hosts, offer some form of mail 'forwarding' and this has particular advantages for small businesses.  In short, you can have a number of email addresses such as admin@mydomain.co.uk, sales@mydomain.co.uk, mary@mydomain.co.uk which can all be 'forwarded' (i.e. 'pointed') to any other email addresses that you wish.  This means that you can offer a memorable corporate 'identity' to your business, staff and colleagues - and sub-contractors even - without changing any existing email arrangements that the individuals concerned might have.  Furthermore, the individual's email addresses (or the individuals !) can be changed at will and the 'corporate' pointer easily changed to the new private address.  Corporate consistency, longevity, identity, good! 

Last modified: December 02, 2003