Your Email Address Is Part of Your Social Media Marketing

In my post "8 Social Media Marketing Mistakes" I said:

Do not use a gmail or hotmail address for professional purposes when you have a professional email address.

For example, do not have a Twitter background displaying your business' website URL and a hotmail email address instead of [yourname]@[yourdomainname] email address.

Of course what I should have added is:

Do use a professional email address (by buying a domain name for your business and getting an email service with it) regardless of whether you yet have a business website.

Use your own name and not info or support for your main email address:

While you may want info@[domainname] for certain purposes, you do NOT want info@[domainname) as your email on your business card. You want some form of your own name (a recognizable part -- not just initials). After all, this is on your business card that you hand out to actual people.

Why do I say that these small details are part of your social media marketing?

Because social media marketing is about relationships. If you are connecting with people online with your real name, why would you hand out cards with an email address of info@[domainname]?

Perhaps the most important business marketing lesson we can learn from the era of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. is that people want to do business with other people – not with faceless businesses. And info@[domainname] falls into the faceless category.



What email address are you using on emails you send to your list?

I am on the email list of someone whose information I admire. But I often do not open her emails because the return email showing in my inbox says support. I actually mentioned this to the person and she said she knows it's not good. (But months later this simple change is still not corrected.)

Why would I want to open an email from support? Many emails from such an address are nothing important.

Yet I would readily open an email from this person if her name were on it. And I do mean her name and not her company name because I might not recognize her company name.

Most of us get so many emails each day that we only scan the incoming ones, choosing to open the ones that look important to us.

Getting an email from info or support usually doesn't fall into the category of important.

What email address you use is important because in today's online world we do want to know there is a real person behind the messages we open – even if software is sending out the messages!

P.S. If you haven't yet taken advantage of the power of email marketing, check out our Miller Mosaic email marketing setup service. We can quickly get you started using this valuable online marketing tool. And we'll make sure that the email address displays the name of a real person!

© 2011 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of Miller Mosaic Social Media Marketing. Download the company's free report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets" at www.millermosaicllc.com/los-angeles-s...