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Running a Small Business? Win Big with Your Email Set-up

By Jimi St Pierre

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 09Mar2008
Word count: 427
Viewed: 206 time(s)

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A big psychological problem - and sales strategy problem - for anyone running a small business, is to avoid looking like a small business. Though being "lean and mean" can be a strength, it is also important to deal with customer perception.

No business wants its potential customers to feel it is cannot deliver the goods, or deliver on its promises based on the size of your company. You know you can do the job, of course - but there is always that nagging feeling that customers might have doubts about the strength of your business.

One easy way to present a small business as a thriving medium sized business, as well as more established and professional is to create a strategic set of email addresses for the business. For example, if your company was called MyCompany Ltd, addresses of the type sales@mycompany.com, support@mycompany.com,or billing@mycompany.com could be deployed to create the necessary front for those activities

These will indicate that there are different departments within your business - no matter that perhaps the only employee for these departments is the same one, and indeed, no matter that this person is just you!

The additional natural and practical benefit, of course, is that it also helps you manage your incoming emails more effectively. It can be also be extremely useful in campaigns or promoting special offers, and tracking the response by simply creating a unique email address for the offer (eg march-sale@mycompany.com. The number of emails received at this specific address means you have absolute proof of the effectiveness or otherwise of any campaign.

The idea can be taken further by "branding". Many companies today not only have multiple email addresses to improve public perception of the company size,, but also have multiple domains to make them look like more than one company as well. Multinational companies such as confectionary specialists can sell ten different 'brands', and so there is no reason not to emulate such organisations. By offering them a 'multiple choice' of a supplier of your goods or services will increase the likelihood of business.

Naturally, as your business grows, an obvious step is to ensure each staff member has their own personalised email address, to improve communications and efficiency. This means they can offer a personal touch - but until those days come, it is good tomake certain your business has the strength of your own personal touch, but the right email "shop window" to ensure customers can have no problem believing in your capabilities at the time of that all-important "first impression".

Jimi St Pierre writes for several Office Equipment companies in the UK, including Principla IT Systems Consultants. Office automation and IT Consultancy services are described in detail at www.principalcorp.co.uk

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