Gauntlet thrown — you’ve got a burning hot idea.

Every now and then lightning strikes each one of us. You know you might be onto a winning idea, but it can be difficult to try to work out your next steps. The execution part. How to turn your idea into a business or showcase for your talent is the subject of numerous tomes, texts, and blogs.

But there’s one thing all great ideas have in common — you will get a lot of attention. And when it comes to your online messages, a professional email address can ignite your communications.

When you want to communicate with your visitors, followers, customers, or perhaps a future employer, using a professional email with a custom email address not only gives you credibility but helps you manage all your communications in one place.

Your idea could be a website that proves your knack for selling a great product, a social account with a unique angle that suddenly grows your audience, or an online portfolio that helps you get further in your career.

Because your email address is chosen by you — you can back up your messages with a brand name that looks professional — and you have so much more credibility. You can also create an email address with your social media account name (more about this later).

But first, let’s back up a little.

What is a professional email address?

A branded email address usually takes this format: you@yourdomainidea.com. A professional email is personalized to you.

Also called a domain name email address, having one helps your business or brand look more professional. It enables you to:

• foster improved trust with prospects, customers, and visitors
• promote your website and company
• help your visitors remember where to go when they need your services

Each time you send an email from a domain-based email address, you are reinforcing the name of your business, blog, or website to your visitors.

Social and email

If you have accumulated interest in your brand via social media and don’t use a website, you can register your social media as a domain name such as:

instagramaccountname.com or youtubechannelname.com

Then, it’s easy to set up a redirect from your domain to your account’s channel. Followers can contact you at your pro email address using your domain name:

you@instagramaccountname.com or you@youtubechannelname.com

Putting it all together, you can imagine how much of an impact you can have with a professional business email to field all your messages from customers (if in business) or followers and fans (if your side hustle is more on social). And they’ll easily identify that their message is from you and your social channel.

In contrast, freemium accounts use someone else’s brand name (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, iCloud, etc.). These are not the best idea if you want to launch your burning hot idea. You will just look like you aren’t sure about committing to your concept.

If you are ready to take things up a notch, let’s find out how pro email hosting helps you.

Fire up your email communications

You may have started with a free account, but now, you are seriously thinking of taking your idea or consultancy to the next level. You need help to look pro. In these grouped use-cases below, having a professional business email can help.

New role, first jobs, students

• Make the right impression with a custom email. Perhaps you are going for a new role with a substantial online requirement. Your next career could be in social media management, copywriting, digital marketing, design UX, UI, graphic or motion design, or Fintec. Sending a custom email address to recruiters that points to your online portfolio shows you understand how to navigate the digital realm.
• Make your mark as an expert consultant, coach, crypto trader, fintech expert, advisor, or influencer by using a pro email address with any business channel. Here, you can use a domain you have registered and redirect it, for example, to your social media.This might be useful if you are a blogger on Instagram or a travel influencer on YouTube. Going with the second example, if your channel is called VTUBOX, you could register the domain VTUBOX.com and redirect it to your YouTube channel. Then, create a business email account called pr@VTUBOX.com to handle queries using a URL redirect.

• Make an impact. If you are a university graduate, student coder, hackathon addict, or experimental app maker, or you’re on the job market, a pro email address adds a touch of digital flair.But don’t wait until you are about to apply for something. Students of any age can get a free .ME domain with Namecheap for their real name or another like BestUXGuy.me (if it’s available). Just go to https://nc.me and get yours.

You can also try Professional Business Email for free for two months and get busy emailing recruiters and companies with your website + email address.

Solopreneurs, small businesses, not-for-profits

Once people start getting interested in you and what you’re doing online it’s a natural progression to want a domain email.

• Look professional when you are just starting out as a solopreneur or web dreamer, or even as a pretty good gamer. If your hot idea has traction, you might wish to brand yourself with a domain name. When you use a business name in your domain email format, it looks like this:Your name@yourbusiness.com

  And your domain is yourbusiness.com which is also the name of your website.

• Gain trust when you are an organizer or send emails for financial reasons. It’s pretty common for small business teams, consultants, community clubs, societies, sports coaches, and anyone running a volunteer group to use a domain email. Their recipients know messages are from the same people who run the associated website/social.

Requesting subscription payments, sending marketing promotions, or collecting and storing data safely is so much easier with ultra-secure email communication.

Large businesses, growing teams

• Handle expansion and a growing headcount. Larger teams and companies use domain email addresses with subscriptions big enough to handle all their traffic. On social, if you were managing an e-shop, you could add your professional email address to your Instagram account to help buyers reach out to you or a team member directly  — far more convenient than answering all those DMs! With email hosting, you can easily divide your contacts into lists collected on social platforms to help you refine your email promotional messages.
• Help your team communicate once your hot idea grows. Pro and Ultimate plans include team collaboration tools. You can do other handy things like share processes, documents and files, track tasks, set appointments, and schedule diaries all from one interface.
• Grow easily, and transfer super-quick to a bigger email plan to get more storage. You can also increase the number of mailboxes you have by this method. For example, Ultimate from Namecheap includes five mailboxes, more than enough for most small teams (note: Pro includes three mailboxes, Starter has one). Another way to grow is to add extra mailboxes at any time for a small cost — to any plan.Multiple mailboxes are great for maintaining your business’s privacy for contacts and shared files. Should you need to part ways with a team member, you can quickly delete their mailbox access and reallocate your resources.

• Gain enhanced security with a professional email package. This gets you access to 2FA, the ability to set up app passwords to protect your main account, and in-built anti-spam protection. These features are a huge advantage for everyone who uses domain business email, no matter their size.

Email hosting in one place is also much easier to manage — now you can get on with setting the world alight!

Keep safe

• Built-in spam protection applies clever filters to keep out unwanted and malicious threats from hackers. It’s an added plus if your business email subscription includes, for free, the use of a blocklist, acceptlist, and the ability to set conditions. You can filter who gets to send messages to your business email. It’s worth a mention that this is all free with Jellyfish spam protection at Namecheap.

Spam protection is vital for your team’s productivity, so they don’t waste time dealing with it or, worse, falling for a phishing attempt. (Jellyfish is also managed in-house.)

Gain credibility

• A professional email address not only drives business awareness but also adds credibility.  Aligning your business/brand domain name + your website or profile, + your email address creates a lot of possibilities. Putting these three planets into orbit, you will create a great first impression.
• A new project, consultancy, or business idea benefits from email hosting and all the expert backup an in-house service provides. You can easily fire up your online communications and enjoy peace of mind with a reliable service.

If you think it is time to put some heat behind your brand and fire up your online email communications…

Let the flames begin!