Your generic email address is losing you money for no good reason.
A study conducted by Visible Logic indicated that 70% of those who see a “generic” email address on your business card (ie: @aol.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com) have a lesser opinion of you than if you had an @yourbusiness.com email address.
In fact, of aol, yahoo, and hotmail, between about 38-50% of those surveyed indicated those email addresses were “totally unprofessional”. So, why on EARTH would you still be using one?
Here’s how to set up a branded email address with your own domain on Gmail in less than 30 minutes.
All it takes is 11 easy, yet somewhat technical steps (assuming your host uses cpanel). Here they are with screenshots:
- Log in to your cPanel and go to “Email Accounts”
- Create the email address. Be sure to select “Unlimited” for Quota if it’s an option. Otherwise non-specific bad things can happen later (like emails being lost when you run out of space). Use a STRONG password.What do I mean by “strong password”? A long (3-4 words) combination of something meaningful to you, but not easy to guess – with at least one upper-case letter, one lower-case letter, a number, and a symbol.
- Find the newly created email address in the list below the form, and click on “More” and then “Configure Email Client”
- Scroll down to the manual settings section and find the SSL-instructions (these are secure connections which keep your email encrypted as it’s being retrieved). Write down these settings, you’ll need them in a few seconds.
- Log in to Gmail, click on the Gear Icon and click on “Settings”. Then click on the Accounts tab, and click on “Add an email address you own” under the “Send Mail As” settings.
- Enter the name you want to appear in the recipient’s “To” field when they get an email from you (your name). And enter the email address and click on Next Step. Keep the checkbox for “Treat As An Alias” checked.
- On the next screen, enter the details you wrote down from Step 4’s secure SSL settings. Select the right port number, enter in the server, username, and the password you selected in Step 2.Be sure to select the bullet for “send through yourdomain.com’s SMTP servers” and the “Secured connection using SSL” bullet. Click “Add Account”.
You’ll be asked to confirm you have permission to send email as this account (and that you own it). Ignore this for now, we’ll tackle it in Step 11.
- You should end up back on the Accounts tab of the settings page. If not, just click on the Gear icon again, click on Settings, and then Accounts.Before we move on to the next step, notice you can “make default” any address in the list? That makes it the default email address you send FROM when you send a new email.Ready to move on? Click on “Add a POP3 mail account you own” under “Check mail from other accounts” settings.
- Enter the email address you created in step 2 and click “Next Step”.
- Now enter the details from step 4 into this screen. Make sure to select the right port from the drop-down for POP. Uncheck the box for “leave a copy of retrieved message on the server” – otherwise your server-side inbox (different from your Gmail inbox) will fill up, causing problems.Check the box for Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail, and if you have multiple domains to set up, and want to segment out your email into separate “folders” (labels in Gmail), check the box for Label incoming messages “you@yourdomain.com”, then click on “Add Account”.
- Go back to your inbox and click on the “Refresh” wheel that is next to the “select all” checkbox button above your emails, when a new email comes in from “The Gmail Team” with a link to confirm that you own your new email address, click on it.
Now, when you go to compose an email, you should see a drop-down accessible in the “FROM” field:
Did this work for you? Do you need help? Let me know in the comments!