Small Businesses (and Not for Profit Organisations) Should be Professional with their Email Addresses
Kudos to all small businesses that have survived 2022 untill today, 2023 is another year to win, especially in areas where you did not do well in 2022. I would like to encourage you to take my advice on the use of email if it is one of the areas where you lagged this year.
There are several channels of communications that businesses can adopt, oral or written. Written communications are easier referenced in comparison to oral communications. Written communications can be paper based or electronic like SMS, WhatsApp, Email etc. Of these, email is the least volatile, SMS and WhatsApp are stored on devices and are easily lost, emails are stored on servers and accessed via internet. My article and advice will be directed to two categories of email usage by small businesses.
- Companies that use free email hosts for business correspondences @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com etc.
- Companies that have emails at their own domain names but have their emails hosted on the same shared servers that is hosting their website.
- Category №1 is completely unprofessional, it is loose, unsecure, possession can be lost too easily, you have too little control over what can happen tomorrow to your email records, it does not place the organisation on a good pedestal. Small businesses, NGOs should depart from this and go professional. I recently had to solve this problem for a company that had been doing communications to their staff using their personal emails, the staff leaves in unhealthy terms and previous communications between the staff and their customers all gone. There are instances where passwords have been lost and all records gone. Beyond all these it is not nice at all to own a business named Dovey Confectioneries and then your email address is doveyconfectioneries@gmail.com, when you can have orders@dovey.com.ng, sales@doveyng.com, recruitment@dovey.ng.
- Category №2 have tried by at least owning their own domain name (and their own website), but having your emails hosted on a shared server is far more disastrous compared to people using free email hosting from reputable organisations like Yahoo, Gmail and co. Access to shared servers are usually fluid, many people can read your emails on them, your website designer, your web-hosting company, others sharing the server with you who successfuly breach your account access will read your emails without the need for your email password.
To move away from these patterns is not too technical and the cost is far less than the cost implications of a disaster in waiting. I will break down what is needed, cost implications and make recommendations. In money terms, N26,250 (or $35.00 at N750.00/$) PER ANNUM can get you started,
A) Buy a domain name — This is always a starting point for a presence on the internet. Domain names are bought from domain registrars, they are sort of your identity on the internet and are unique, no two domain names can exist. There are two decisions you need to make here;
a) Decide on a name that is as short as possible, connects with your business, memorable and as much as possible, avoid having same letters following one another, people might miss them and could be dangerous if someone else owns something similar with one letter instead of yours with two, your customers might be misled into dealing with them. For example jewellimited.com and jewelimited.com, usually you can buy both and keep the one you do not need. Long domain names are a headache, do not buy doveycakesandconfectineries.com, people will keep making mistakes typing them, just buy doveycakes.com, no need for ltd, limited, enterprises e.t.c. in domain names. Buy domain names for what you do not necessarily your comapany name. For instance if your comapany name is Almaroof Nigeria Limited and all you sell is building materials, buy something like buildingmart.com, it will connect better than almaroof.com. Oh yes you can also own almaroof.com if it is a holding company for many lines of businesses, this is good for partner and investor relations. mike@almaroof.com can be used to engage in franchise discussions with partners, while orders@buldingmart.com will be for your customers and on collaterals you use in advertising your products.
b) Once you decide on the name to buy, you want to decide on the appropriate top level domain (tld) and/or country code (cc) to use. I will explain this; tld are your .com, .org, .net, .africa, .biz etc. Business line dictates the choice mostly, .com is short form for commerce/commercial, typically used by businesses, .org is organisation, used by not for profit entities like churches, NGOs etc, .net for internetworking service providers, .africa could be used to indicate that you have coverage over Africa and so on. These tlds can further have cc suffixes like .org.ng, .org.gh, .org.uk, .co.uk, .com.ng etc. cc (country code) are indicators of which country the company is domiciled. Some countries like Nigeria allow buying your name directly on the country code, like thebuildermart.ng.
All the tlds and cc have different cost implications, some are cheaper depending on the domain registrar you are buying from. .ng/.com.ng domain names are reasonably priced when you buy from a Nigerian accredited registrar, but 5x ~ 10x may be demanded if you are buying them from registrars accredited in other regional internet registries. Yes, domain records are stored in internet registries. I remember statting that no two domain names can exist, it remains true, but linkedin.com can exist and linkedin.com.ng can also exist, the difference is tld. Buying domain names is about choosing the most inviting fantasy.
B) Choosing Email Host — Once you decide on domain name, the next decision should be which email host do I use? In the earlier part of the article, I wrote something about people hosting their emails on shared servers; some domain registrars also do website hosting, they usually offer shared hosting powered by a software called Cpanel. While it is possible, it is a terrible idea to host your emails on your shared server, it is mostly not their forte, it is like having your carpenter handle plumbing and electrical works because he understands it. Email technology is not secure by design, your emails are just pieces of files in folders on a computer (server), you really do not want to have it handled carelessly and this is where Email Host comes in. Most of the free email host make their money from professional services they offer by hosting people’s emails for them with their choice domain names. The likes of Gmail, Yahoo, Protonmail, Zohomail etc even though offer you free email on their own domain name, also offer hosting your email with your own domain name for a fee. There are also some Email Hosts that just offer just email hosting, examples are Yandex and Migadu. In choosing email host, you need to consider, cost, cost and cost. All providers that I have reviewed except Migadu have the same pricing structure, they bill per month, per mailbox and per mailbox size, they may charge $5.00 per month for a user for a maximum of 5GB space and they may charge $8.00 per month for a user for a maximum of 10GB space for your mailbox. Migadu is however different, for Migadu, you just buy one big size and create as many mailboxes as you wish. The edge Migadu has is that you are not paying for a space you are not using. Imagine if a staff leaves your organisation, for other providers, it will be unreasonable to keep paying for the ex-staff’s unused mailbox, so they delete it, but for Migadu, you will not have to, you just need to ensure that the staff does not have access to it anymore. Migadu’s edge is that it does not box you into paying for orders@bikefixers.ng and recruitment@bikefixers.ng when it is one man that handles both in reality as it is typical with small businesses.
C) Configure your Domain Name to work with your Mail Host. This is technical , but a discription of what happens is that you give your email host your domain name and they give you back some parameters to give to your domain name registrar. These parameters are placed in a section called Domain Name Servers (DNS) inside a portal made available by your domain registrar for you to manage your domain. When people make any request about your domain name, whether they need to visit your website, send you an email and the rest, the request first goes to the registrar in custody of your domain name and the registrar directs the request to the location. Once in a while, I get this part done for people.
D) Create Email boxes. Once you configure © above, the email host will give indicators that the domain name can be communicated to, meaning that you are set to send and receive emails. You can then begin to create email boxes and email groups, these two ahve no universal standards, it is dependent on the email host. It is sometimes complicated on a host like Zoho, but very simple on a host like Migadu. Email groups can be created as their own seprate mailbox or as just an alias for a group of staff. You might want all your staff in Sales department to receive email coming to sales@tastyburger.ng even though they all have their individual email boxes. If you want to be able to send email to customers using sales@tastyburger.ng, you may need to create its own mailbox but if you don’t, just leave it as an alias.
So what is the cost? I gave an hint earlier, you only need to buy your domain name from the registrar (checkout qservers.net and onlydomains.com for price hints), which is also renewed annualy and equally pay for email hosting. Migadu has an entry price of $19 per annum that allows you to configure as many domain names as you wish and as many mailboxes as you wish. Of course, there’s a global limit of 5GB for this plan, but compared to a Googele that would have charged you $60.00 per annum for JUST ONE mailbox, this is cheap. Migadu has other higher plans, their $90.00 per annum plan being my favourite.
Thanks for reading (and making a move to switch to professional email hosting)
All domain names used in this article are for illustration, they may or may not exist, they were all spontaneously formed. Also, no guarantees have been given for the companies mentioned, you may please do your independent findings.
