Is Your Email Address Portable & Professional?
As a Real Estate Professional, your email address should be a key part of your personal branding, your professional image, and your marketing strategy.
Many agents change their brokerage once or twice during their career, some more than twice. Any un-planned change in your email address can have a huge impact on your productivity, and your continuity with your personal sphere-of-influence. Shouldn't your email address, like your website, blog, and personal branding, be part of your personal marketing strategy?
Using a generic email address such as Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, or your ISP, or one from your brokerage, has several disadvantages. Not only technical ones, but also for your brand-image. What if you had to change your ISP or your brokerage?
Your Own Domain Name Email?
The best solution for your professional image is to have your own domain name, and use it for both your email and your website. This presents several technical hurdles, but not any big ones, and it ensures your own portable, professional branding.
Get your own domain name(s), if you don’t have one already. Make it personal, and/or local. GoDaddy is neither the cheapest nor the most expensive, but is the most flexible and convenient. I've had experience with all the major domain registrars, and prefer GoDaddy for its many features/ benefits/ advantages. (Ask me for a discount code if you are interested in registering, transferring, or renewing your domain name with GoDaddy.)
With your own domain name, you have several choices for your email handling.
1. GoDaddy free email forwarding:
Go Daddy FREE Email Forwarding Setup, in six screen shots
— or —
2. Google Apps, with Gmail for Your Domain, to host your email, which is still free for small businesses and organizations. As of Mid-2011, you can get up to 10 free logins (inboxes) for you and your group, with over 7GB each for email storage. This offers a complete solution with flexible options, including Gmail for web-mail, and POP, IMAP, MS-Outlook or other email clients for offline storage, backup, and syncing. Spam filtering, HTTPS security, and several types of email authentication (SPF, DKIM) are available. There are many steps and a large variety of options, Gmail is simply powerful, so it does take a bit of planning and configuring.
You can have specifically purposed email addresses such as:
MyName @ MyDomain .com
Team @ MyDomain .com
Sales @ MyDomain .com
Info @ MyDomain .com (or .net, .biz, .us, .info if necessary, but .com is best)
etc.
... all coming into your Gmail inbox. You can have a few other inboxes for an assistant, associates, webmaster, or aide, still for free, from Google, at this time.
Your Email, Contacts, and Calendar, all within Google Apps, can sync with many devices, such as your iPad and smart-phone.
You can always use your brokerage-email for internal communication, while publishing your own domain-email on your business cards and marketing materials. There are options for consolidating these in your main Gmail inbox, as desired.
I've helped many agents with the technical side of their setup for email, websites, and real estate marketing including SEO, Lead-Capture, and branding. There are various possible scenarios for your email solution. Let's outline the choices, tradeoffs, and tailor an approach that would be customized for your own needs to make your email address professional and portable.
Any questions?
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