How to Choose a Professional Email Address

The basics: create a brand new address

A professional email address is a business address that you use just for conducting business. This means that your personal email address goes out the window when it comes to business communication. 

And no matter how long you’ve used it, it’s best to create a new address on a business domain for your business contacts and potential customers.

The benefits are many: you will be taken more seriously by your recipients and you’re just as likely to stay out of the spam folder.

Also, legitimate business emails come with cool features such as email tracking, unlimited storage, multiple email inboxes for incoming emails, and more.

If you’re not sure where to get started, you can use email name generators, but they may not be the best choice for a professional email identity. Only you will know best what kind of email experience you want to provide.

Which characters are allowed in emails?

While some email services accept some special characters in an email address, it’s best to steer clear of them altogether if you want to create a professional business address for marketing purposes.

Ideally, you should consider creating an email address that uses your domain name – rather than having [email protected], for example, go for [email protected] – this way, you have an email address that can be used for a wide range of purposes including marketing, general inquiries, customer service, and more.

The simpler, the better when it comes to your email address. Adding in special characters could run the risk of your email address looking spammy and unprofessional.

Creating your email address: allowed characters

Special characters that are allowed in your email address will often depend on the service that you use. Most services will accept characters such as &, !, ?, -, _, and more, although it is important to be careful how you use them when you create a custom email address

You should only add special characters to your email address if there is a legitimate purpose for them. Since your domain name should be your business name, it is not advised to use your business name as the email prefix.

Ideally, you should choose a simple word like ‘info’, ‘marketing’, ‘hello’, ‘inquiries’, or ‘contact’ as these are professional, easy to remember, and unlikely to be flagged as spam by email services.

Depending on how you want your marketing email address to appear, some special characters might be necessary. Wherever possible, email users should keep these to a minimum and avoid using an exclamation mark as this could look spammy, not to mention unprofessional.

Hyphens, underscores, ampersands, and periods are some of the more acceptable types of special characters that are usually allowed in email addresses. Providing that you have a legitimate reason to use these characters in the prefix of your email address they are unlikely to look unprofessional or spammy.

However, don’t add them if you do not need to – it’s always best to keep your email address as simple as possible. You may risk creating a generic email address, but you’ll have a more secure business email that you can use to send bulk emails.

Is the plus sign allowed in email addresses?

Some email service providers will allow a plus sign, including Gmail.

However, it’s important to bear in mind that a plus sign could clutter your email address and make it look unprofessional.

Therefore, it’s only advisable to add it where there is a legitimate reason to do so. For example, you could include it in your domain name as an alternative to ‘plus’ or ‘and’ if this is not available as a domain name.

Like other special characters, it is a good idea to avoid using plus signs in the prefix or domain name of your marketing email address as it can complicate things and make the email address harder to remember.

A simple email address is cleaner, looks more professional, and is more likely to be recognized by your customers when you send marketing emails. There are plenty of options to create personalized emails that your prospective customers will find more attractive than using this sign.

What special characters are allowed in an email address domain?

General email addresses like [email protected] are not going to cut it these days when it comes to creating a professional marketing email address for your entire business. Instead, you are going to need your own website domain name.

Using your website domain means that people will instantly know that they are getting emails from your business because of the email address, and it also provides them with your website domain name where they can find your products and services or check out your blog.

A custom domain is a big mark of professionalism and shows that you have a really successful business that people can visit if they want. Along with this, your email address is simply much cleaner when you use your business domain.

Customers are more likely to remember your domain and follow the link to find out more information. Like emails, using special characters in a domain name is advised to be done sparingly, and only where there is a legitimate reason. For example, you may want to add a hyphen or underscore to separate two words in the domain where this makes sense to do so.

Which characters are not allowed in email addresses?

The special characters that are not supported in email addresses will depend on the provider that you use. Special characters will not be allowed two or more times consecutively in your email address. Along with this, you cannot start or finish the prefix with a special character.

Special characters in subject lines

Once you have created your email address and are ready to start sending marketing emails, you may also be wondering if you can use special characters in subject lines.

Subject lines have a limit of eighty characters, but there’s no need to fill it all – in fact, studies have found that shorter subject lines of just two to three words tend to work much better than longer ones when it comes to open and click-through rates.

How to create a professional email address for email marketing

Choose your email host

When you get started with your business, you will usually purchase a domain and hosting. One way to create your professional email marketing address is to choose a hosting package that includes business emails.

This will usually be at an additional cost; however, it makes it much easier to set up professional email addresses for your business. With this method, you will need to go to your hosting site and find the ‘email’ section, where you will be able to set up the email address.

Connect to an email client

If you use your hosting platform to host your email, the next step is to connect the address to an email client or email provider. To do this, go to your hosting platform and click on the ‘email’ section. You will usually find an option to ‘set up email client’ or similar.

When you click on this, you will usually see a step-by-step process that you can follow to set up your email with mail apps such as Outlook and Google Workspace.

Connect to marketing software

Finally, you will need to make sure that the email marketing automation platform that you use is able to access your email address. This process will usually include going into your marketing software settings and looking for an ‘email sending’ or ‘domains’ section.

Once you click on this, you should be walked through the process of connecting your email address. If you plan on sending a large number of emails per day for business purposes, using email marketing software is the smart move.

The benefits of using a professional marketing email address

If you are sending marketing materials to your customers and audience via email, then you will want to make a professional impression from the get-go. There are many benefits of creating a dedicated, professional business email address for marketing purposes.

Firstly, doing this means that your brand name will be reflected clearly in any marketing materials that you send to your audience. This will help you avoid the spam filter and make sure that your brand is in with a better chance of being recognized.

In addition, you will also need to create a professional email address in order to use some of the most reputable email service providers such as Constant Contact or MailChimp.

Using a custom domain for your business email addresses allows you to set up sales and marketing email addresses that make it easier for you to nurture and build relationships with leads, sending out information that will ultimately help you grow your business.

And finally, business email accounts will often come with additional security options that will help you filter and block any phishing or hacking attempts, which will reduce your risk of a business data breach.

If you want to start sending marketing emails to grow your business, one of the first things that you will need to do is set up a professional business email address. Keeping it simple, clean, and professional is important for making a good impression on your customers and avoiding spam filters.

Make the most out of your business emails

A professional identity and a business address are just the beginning of your email marketing journey. To get the best return on investment from emails, you need clean email lists. This means lists of legitimate accounts, without disposable addresses, those with typos, spam traps, and all other forms of invalid emails.

We can help and remove those addresses for you. Sign up for Bouncer today and validate your first 100 emails completely free!