How important is your email address?

Companies spend thousands of dollars making sure their logo, company colors, message and image are consistently and professionally represented.

One area that seems to be overlooked is the importance of your email address being consistent with your firm. New lawyers and lawfirms starting out are signing up for free email accounts, (ie:Gmail,Yahoo, etc.) as their business email, instead of using an email address with their firm's website name. Many people will add a second “business” email to an existing personal account. Free email addresses say: I’m new, I’m small and I’m cheap; which is usually not the image a law firm wants to project. 

Websites mirror the image of a law firm; many times with the firm name as the website and/or domain name. To maintain a consistent professional image of your law firm, your email address should be the same as your website address. Christine@mylawfirm.com, has a more professional image than mylawfirm@gmail.com. 

Spammers have software that crawls websites searching for email addresses, and "contact" and "info" and two used most often and receive the highest spam.  Select a name for your catch-all email address to be something less common, and use a alias email address on your website to deter spam.

This shows not only a level of professionalism, but also assures your client on a subliminal level, that you really are with the firm. With growth of email scams, this one little area may make a huge difference to the very prospective client you are attempting to reach.

Most website packages come with a minimum of at least one email address, which your webmaster could have forwarded to your free or aol address if you only want one area to check emails. This way it can still be convenient for you, yet show the most professional image for your law firm, large or small.

We placed a poll on a previous blog and the results seem to say the same thing:

How important is it to your professional image to have a business email address (yourname@yourbusinessname.com) instead of a free email address.

Essential 48%
Very Important 25%
Not Important 7%
No Difference 11%
Don’t know 9%

This is something to consider in your overall branding plan.