Any marketing person will tell you that appearances are priceless, and that you never get a chance to make a first impression. Cliche phrases, yes, but as with many there’s still a kernel of truth to it all.

Since one of business’ primary methods of communication is email, when you’re making a new contact people will take note of your email address – when you hand out a card, or when you tell them your email address by voice, people will make a mental note. But is the information you’re giving them going to help or hinder the impression they’re making of you?

Let’s start by looking at the anatomy of an email address, so we understand what we’re talking about. If you send an email to ‘jsmith@example.com’, then ‘jsmith’ is the username, and ‘example.com’ is the domain name. (As an aside, if someone gives you an email address but not a website address, try typing the domain name part of their email address into your web browser.)

The first point to keep in mind if you’re in business for yourself is to have the correct domain name. If you work for Acme Co., what sort of impression are you making if your email address if from your internet service provider? If people are asked to do business with Acme, but are then asked to send email to a Hotmail (Or Verizon, or Shaw, or Bell) account, it sends an unprofessional and mixed message unless you actually work for that company. Why don’t they have their own email? Is this a real company? Is this some sort of scam? These are all questions that the wary or un-trusting might ask themselves.

Next, is your domain name too long? Finding the right domain name to use can be tricky, especially since there are an estimated 95 million domain names registered (according to the Domain Tools website). Ideally, you don’t want anything hard to remember or anything with trick spelling, and nothing too long. Acme.com is of course the best, and AcmeWidgets.com is good, AcmeWidgetsOfCanada.com is acceptable, and AcmeWidgetsOfCanadaBCDivision.com is too long. A good limit is somewhere around 10-12 characters – enough to make one or two words unless of course you have a long business name. A good bet here might be to check with the marketing department to get their input.

And what about the username component of it all? Should you use first initial/ last name, or the other way around? What about a generic mailbox account? Generic accounts should most often not be on business cards. The card identifies the company AND the person. If I want to get in touch with a person, I don’t want to send email to a generic ‘info@acme.com’ address, I want to send it to the person.

As for the other conventions, using JSmith as the username format is slightly more formal than anything else, and using JohnS demonstrates a more relaxed attitude. A recent trend is to use full names with a dot, such as John.Smith; this conveys a sense of openness since you have the full name, and allows you to determine for yourself the level of formality with which you can approach the person.

Of course, you need to decide for yourself what naming convention your company will use, depending on the image you’re trying to put forward. And it’s easy to have more than one email address to suit different purposes such as having ‘jsmith’ and ‘johns’ both pointing to the same mailbox; also note that it’s easy to own multiple domain names – one for the company website, and a shorter one just for email. Your technical services provider can help you accomplish these changes.

As for myself, my company is a service provider, so I always encourage people to ask.Jeremy@cpgsystems.ca