business email setup

Business Email Set Up 101

Lisa M. | February 29, 2024
10 mins

One of the most creative tasks you’ll ever do as an entrepreneur is to set up a business email. It’s a bold step into the world of direct marketing, and a vital one. 

But like all things to do with ‘business’ and making money, there’s an art to creating a business email. The information provided is common for the majority of professional email providers. Examples of some features or cases will be shown using our Namecheap Private Email service.

We’ll show you:

- Why your business will benefit from custom domain email

- Three ways branded email helps create customer trust

- How to set up a custom domain email address

- How to set up email forwarding to any other email address

- How to set up a different email client (like Gmail or Outlook) so you can send domain-branded emails from any interface you like

So, let’s get you set up!

If you chose Namecheap Private Email and need help getting started, check out the video or article guide. And remember to use this link to log in to your Private Email account.


Benefits of having a business email

It’s a basic question. And so is the answer. Using business email, you’ll make more sales and more connections—pure and simple.

For everyone sending emails in business, there comes a ‘lightbulb moment’. You realize professional business email is now a necessity so you can do the following: 

1. Reach out to your clients and employees.

2. Welcome new customers to your brand.

3. Provoke additional engagement for new products and company events.

Email collaboration tools provide more options when working in teams or groups to:

1. Use office tools, docs, and software to share, manage, and organize your work.

2. Segment contact lists by customer, suppliers, and employee groups, so you can automate who receives messages.

3. Schedule meetings and benefit from shared calendars.

4. Advanced email search and organization

When your business creates the right first impression with email, customers recognize your company name from your website. A pro email address helps you drive sales, increases trustworthiness, makes teamwork easier, and secures your data.

And that’s just for starters.


Three ways your brand gains trust using a custom domain email

A funny thing about your customers is they’re far more likely to do business with you if all your online communication looks professional and consistent. This really matters. If you conduct business correspondence through free @gmail.com mail, customers might think you aren’t related to the business you represent, and they are looking at a phishing email. People are more likely to trust a sender who they can immediately see has written to them using an official site email address.

1. Because just any old name won’t do

Of course, the big reason to make a business email is to gain access to any email address you want. Most companies opt for a format like sendername@yourbusiness.com, but it really depends on what your goals are.

If you think about it, you'll need some good luck getting the exact name you want if you are searching something like Gmail, competing with those 1.5 billion other Gmail users. When you choose a professional email solution, the only limit to your name is your imagination.

To reiterate, when you create a professional business email, you can have any name you want. Most importantly, you can choose your name combined with your business name.

2. You can mix it up with styles and interfaces and internal groups 

Create email lists, share emails and calendars, and don’t forget to put a company signature!

- Team collaboration tools to work on professional documents. 

- An intuitive calendar where you can manage the schedules of both you and your employees.

- Connect your desktop or mobile clients and enjoy the interface you are used to.

Namecheap’s Private Email offers all these functions, too, as well as a unified inbox. With this feature, you can add all your email accounts (either from Namecheap, or outside accounts) and manage them in one place. This article on sharing and unified mailboxes shows you how easy this is to do, and how to share your calendars and contacts. It’s simple to set up your business email inside any client you’d like to use.

3. The big security factor

You might not realize how vital email security is for your business. Suppose you’ve worked hard to establish your business and gather customer data, addresses, and other personal and identifiable information. A pivotal step to securing all of this information is ensuring you have a reputable provider.

When choosing email hosting, the most crucial decision is to decide who to go with. There are lots of cheap and expensive options to choose from, but the cost doesn’t equal service quality in this market.

Today there are a number of necessary things that must be implemented on the side of your provider:

- 2 Factor Authentication.

- Spam Protection.

- GDPR Compliance.

If 2FA is provided, is there a possibility to block IMAP, POP3 and SMTP connections? Email protocols know nothing about the 2FA you have for webmail and thus, if someone has your credentials and tries accessing your email from email client (and not from webmail), second authentication factor will not be triggered. With Namecheap Private Email, you can just get in touch with our Customer Support and we'll block connections via protocols in a minute so that your 2FA really works.

This service will minimize the risks of hacking or compromising for both your own, and your employees' emails.

With one in five small businesses suffering a cyber attack in 2021, it’s clear no amount of reputational loss can justify choosing a less secure hosting provider. Safeguard your privacy, and your customer’s with the right email provider.


How to create a business email

Before creating an email account for a business, it’s worth checking out a few providers to compare their offers.

A small tip when comparing service providers: Consider a company that offers all the tools you need: domain registration, hosting, and email. It’s much more convenient to manage everything in one account than on separate websites from different providers.

Let’s take a look at what to do after you’ve decided on which plan and company to go with.

Step 1: Create a company email domain

Usually, the domain name you are using for your website should be used for your company email address as well.

However, if you don’t have a website yet or you want to have a separate domain for the email address, it’s important to include the name of your organization to increase brand awareness and gain your customers’ trust.

If you need help deciding on a domain name, our Business Name Generator can help. Choose from thousands of options generated by AI based on your search.

Step 2: Create your business email account

When the domain name is chosen, you are ready to create and set up an email address. The very first thing to do after purchasing an email service is to change the DNS settings for your domain.

In order for the email service to work properly, MX and SPF records are required, so make sure you either contact the support of your chosen email provider or check their guidance.

If you purchased one of our Private Email subscriptions, you can check this article to see how to update your DNS records.

Once the DNS records are set, you can proceed with creating your first mailbox.

Step 3: Access your email account

Commonly, email providers give a direct link to log into your mailbox or it can be done via your general account.

Private Email users can access the email account through this link - https://privateemail.com/ or set it up with any email client they are already familiar with. The credentials will still be the ones you set during the mailbox creation.

Step 4: Manage your business email addresses

Once all the preparations are completed, it’s time to manage your address:

- Create several mailboxes for different channels of communications (e.g. for support inquiries help@yourdomain.com) and for your employees.

- Check storage distribution between mailboxes to make sure no email is missed.

- Set up Two-Factor Authentication for your mailboxes to additionally secure your data.

- Configure spam settings.

- Customize your signature.

A few other tips:

- Single-use — set email forwarding when you go on vacation and want someone else (or another account of yours) to receive emails that generally go to you.

- Filtering — send a selection of emails to a specific folder or another email account when you create a filter. For example, when a title contains ‘new product name’, send these to an employee’s account.

- Create aliases — an alias address is a virtual email address that forwards emails to your mailbox. Alias names receive emails but cannot send them. Why would you use them? For example, you might want the website visitors to contact you for information. To get them to register for updates or newsletters, you could create an alias for the contact email address. That way, you don’t get thousands of replies to your primary mailbox. Similarly, you might want to use info@, and simply forward emails to the desired address. You can easily make named alias addresses for anything, perhaps employee groups too, like customerservice@nctutorials.com. By the way, with Private Email, you can make 10 aliases per mailbox with the Namecheap Starter plan, 50 with Pro, and unlimited with the Ultimate plan.

To containerize what’s next for Namecheap users—and you can also find this information in the ‘Welcome to Private Email’ message—after routing your MX records correctly, you’ll go on to create your mailbox and alias names. 

But first, read on for some mailbox advice.

A few mistakes to avoid during the mailbox setup stage

- Do Not Use Nicknames – Imagine you got a business email with the address EmperorMike@financecity.com. Would you trust this address? Add this to the fact it was from a company that offered financial services, and it might raise your eyebrows a notch. In general, it’s good advice to avoid using nicknames that could potentially undermine the image of your business. It’s not worth the risk.

- Avoid Using Numbers – Since you have the full freedom to create the email addresses you want, keep things simple. Using yourname@yourdomain.com is usually good enough and if using numbers, keep in mind many use these on their personal accounts, so you might give the wrong impression. If you have multiple employees with the same name, consider using their middle name in their email address for differentiation.

- Avoid Long AddressesBecause your customers potentially have to type in your email address manually, the shorter you can keep it, the better. If you have a long surname, try using one letter only. For example, PaulB@icon.cars is better than PaulBartholemew@icon.cars because the domain ‘icon.cars’ tends to get lost in the noise. Try not to use periods and other punctuation in your email for business — this will have the added benefit of avoiding confusion.

Your business email setup is done!

Now you are ready to write your first business email and impress your customers with your domain business name.

For Namecheap Private Email users, here’s a handy list of all the links you need to set everything up and get going with your business email account.

- Private Email professional email hosting product page

- First, set up your DNS - video

- How to set up a mailbox or two

- Set up email forwarding

- How to get your free 2FA

- Namecheap bite-sized set of video explainers

- All about Private Email all in one place

- Setting up a unified inbox, with shared calendar and shared contacts

- Adding different email clients including mobile device set up

If you are still thinking of what email provider to choose, check out the 10 Best Email Service Providers of 2022

However, if you have already decided to become a family member of Namecheap Private Email, you are welcome to check out the product page and try any plan for free for 2 months or purchase with a discount for the first year. You can also see what our customers say about Private Email.

FAQ

How do I create a business email address?

The general steps are:

1. Get a domain name for your email address

2. Create an email account

3. Adjust settings to fit your needs

What email is best for a business?

There are several points that could help choosing the best option for you:

- If you are choosing between paid and free business email accounts, keep in mind that free options don’t provide enough security level for businesses. 

- Features to pay attention to: storage, the number of mailboxes and aliases, collaboration tools like calendars

- Security: 2FA, spam filters, encryption


Biography

Picture of Lisa M.

Lisa M.

As a digital technology copywriter, I'm passionate about communicating how vital the information industry is and how stuff works. If it's complicated I believe it can also be engaging. With 10 years of copywriting in B2B and B2C marketing, technology is rocking my world.

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