The Effect of Your Email Address

Good morning everyone and I hope you are all enjoying the first piece of half decent weather for what feels like years!!!

I was reading an extremely interesting report yesterday and I thought that I had to share it with you as I know many of you may be directly affected by the information contained in it!

The report was carried out on the value of having a company specific email address over a generic one - @evolutionweddingservices.co.uk over @hotmail.co.uk for example. The research carried out suggested that potential customers perceived a generic email address as unprofessional and, faced with a choice, were 80% more likely to contact a company with a company specific email address.

80% more likely!!! That's 8 out of 10 people, a huge amount.

Let's put it into perspective.

Imagine you've got a pretty good website and you're getting 100 visitors through it per day. Unfortunately you're never going to convert all of your visitors into enquiries, but you can potentially get up to 10% (sometimes beyond) if you implement my techniques (but I'm sure you knew that already :)). That means of your 100 visitors, 10 will be making an enquiry... unless you have a generic email address. In that case you'll be getting only 2!

I've already had this conversation with someone who replied "I can live with two enquiries a day!" I think he missed the point slightly, but my response was "Maybe you can, but can you live without the 8 enquiries you are losing?!?!?"

He was adament that this was fine so I ran through some figure with him (it really bugs me when people can't take good advice!). It turned out he was spending copious amounts of money on advertising to get these 2 enquiries per day along with a few telephone enquiries so I laid it on the line for him - "How much would you be willing to pay for an advert that bought in an extra 250 leads per month?" I could sense he was starting to get the point!!!

Most hosting companies will supply you an email address which is specific to your web domain for a maximum of £7-8 per month, most a lot, lot less. That could mean a 500% increase in enquiries for less than a tenner a month - if that doesn't make sense to you, then you are wasting your time reading this!!!

FYI a generic email address is anything that is recognisably not associated to your website: aol, hotmail, gmail, live, yahoo, lycos, plus any number of others.

If you have any questions then just give me a shout, or look at the articles in the members pages of the Evolution site. If you need to email me its edward@hotmail.com - only joking!!!!

Until next time



Edward