Is your email address making people mistrust you?

Let’s talk about your email address today.

This is on my mind because last week I got a phone call from a brokerage firm I opened a new account with. It was a customary “How you doing/can I help you invest?” call. I said no to the investment help but then expressed interest in possibly transferring my IRA from another brokerage firm to them. The rep said, “Great – I’ll email you a link to upload a statement so we can get the details”.

Yeah, great until I got the email. The return address was not the expected “rep@brokerage-firm-name dot com.” It was decidedly weird in the format: name.anothername.team@unknown-url dot com.

Sorry, but I’m not clicking any links in that email.

However, I did a little digging, and I concluded that this was a legit email. The unknown URL was in fact a stealth one the company uses. But I was still surprised that this brokerage firm – a giant one you’ve definitely heard of – would have an email formatted this badly. I requested the branch manager call me.

Email and trust

To his credit, he did and explained what happened. They have two systems, the wrong one was used. I get it, but I told him this should never happen, and that the return email address is especially important in trust, especially when discussing financial matters. He agreed and said they’d do better.

But it’s not just finances: your business email is important in all matters. I don’t care how small or large your company is, your return email address should not raise any questions.

On the raising questions note, here’s another personal email anecdote: I started writing for my client Crest Capital 17 years ago. In the beginning, all my work was internal – web copy and marketing stuff.

As time went on and I learned more about the business and became an expert in the equipment financing and lending industry, my tasks expanded to writing equipment financing and related articles for outside trade publications. In this aspect I am communicating with outside entities and representing Crest Capital, so I use the @crestcapital email account they assigned me. This alleviates any questions that could arise if I used my own clear-writing email address.

So now that we know how I feel about email and credibility, here are some tips and checks for you to consider:

If you have a company URL, your email should be @your-url dot com. If your system is adding something or has to have a department in front of it or similar, that’s going to hurt you. Try and fix that, because your customer doesn’t care if that’s the way your system does it. It’s simply not their problem. Leave generic @gmail or other free email services for personal use. If I see Gmail or whatever on a business email, right away it’s a negative. It’s easy and inexpensive to have a legitimate email address from your company URL, and you can even do it through Gmail for a few bucks a month. I know a lot of young businesses try and get away with the generic free address, but that simply tells me you aren’t invested enough in yourself to get a proper URL and email. And if you don’t believe in yourself that much, then why should I? To me, that’s a very fair question. Make sure you know what your “from” email looks like. But don’t just check it on your end – send an email to someone, then check on their computer or phone to see how the “from” address is displayed. I’ve seen plenty of people unaware that their displayed address was weird from their email system adding something unnecessary.

Scams are getting more and more prolific by the day. If your return email address raises any questions whatsoever, it’s going to hurt you. Make sure yours is clean. – Inc./Tribune News Service