Setting up a professional email account is an important step to take when you launch your online business. And yet, it's a bit confusing and you might think it's going to cost you extra! In this post I'll walk you through my favorite way of setting up professional email addresses using both Bluehost and Siteground.
As a cherry on top, we will also integrate these new email addresses into Outlook so we don't need to use the (not-so-good) default webmail clients. Ready? Let's go!
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What is a professional email address?
Before we set these email addresses up, what exactly is an email address?
A professional email address is how you want your readers, viewers, and customers to find you and communicate with you over business matters.
Unlike your personal email addresses, you can't just click a few buttons to create an email address for your online business. We will cover the entire process in this tutorial.
What is a professional Email Address Format?
We are all used to using a @gmail.com email address for most of our communication.
But when we launch our online business, the personal email address format just won't cut it anymore.
Instead of @gmail.com or @hotmail.com at the end of our email addresses, you will start to use your own domain name for your professional email addresses.
So if your website is at http://unbeatabletech.com/ you will use an email address like John@testing.homeofbacon.com instead of johnatincomemesh@gmail.com.
It's as simple as that! But just to make it super easy for you to create your own addresses, here are some great ideas (and bad ones) to help you create good email addresses.
Professional Email Address Ideas
I'll end these emails with @ - just add your domain address to the end to see how they feel.
Great Email Ideas
Your Name@
Hello@
Support@
Marketing@
Sales@
Affiliates@
Refunds@
Hi@
News@
Deals@
Info@
No-reply@
Terrible Email Ideas
Your Name+1121@
LatestDealz@
JohnAndSuzi4ever@
BuyMyProducts@
Conclusion: Is it professional to have numbers in your email address?
I obviously had a bit of fun with this list, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure you keep your professional email addresses short, memorable, and relevant to what you are doing.
Even if you are a one man show, it makes sense to create a few email addresses for different purposes. It will help you organize your workflow and be more efficient.
And please... no numbers in your email address. Pretty please.
In general, if your email address doesn't end in the domain name of your site, you have a bit of work ahead of you to get with the times!
Why should you set up a free business email address?
Having your own professional email address for your online business is important for a few reasons.
Most email marketing providers like Mailerlite and Convertkit won't let you send marketing emails without having one
It's nice to separate business from personal stuff
A lot of people get stuck trying to create their own email marketing accounts because of this step. But not you (after completing this tutorial!)
In this tutorial we will use Bluehost as the email hosting provider, because I personally use them, and they have a very nice and beginner-friendly user interface. And you can get great performance on your sites with a small budget!
Can I use GMail for my professional Email Address?
Absolutely - many people use GSuite for their businesses. Especially if you are used to using Gmail for your personal email, it's a natural evolution to GSuite.
However, setting up GSuite takes several steps and adjustments to some of your server settings, and it will also add an additional monthly fee to your new business. For those reasons, we will stick with our web host's built-in email hosting for this tutorial.
What Is GMail's Professional Email Pricing?
GSuite has 3 main pricing plans: Basic, Business, and Enterprise.
For most small businesses, I think the Basic plan is plenty. The main thing you are going to miss on the basic plan is the limits on storage.
If you are the type of person who likes to store everything in the cloud, you can fill up the 30GB allowance pretty quickly.
For the rest of the tutorial we are going to dive into the step-by-step process to set up a professional email using my favorite web host, Bluehost.
How to set up your business email address using Bluehost
Step 1: Log into your Bluehost account and head over to the Email and Office Section
Step 2: Select the domain name that you want to create an free professional email address, and click Manage.
Step 3: Click the create button to make your new address!
Step 4: Configure your new email address. You're going to want to
Select the domain name for the email (the website linked to the account)
Pick your username (the stuff before the @ sign)
Choose a strong password (no HELLO123 please!)
Allocate space to the account. If you are on an unlimited plan by Bluehost, you can make this unlimited - otherwise just pick an amount that makes sense
Once you are happy, click the blue Create button at the bottom of the page.
Congratulations - you are so pro now!
Awesome, if you've followed along you now have a free professional email address to go along with your Bluehost-powered website!
You can access the email now directly through Bluehost's interface by clicking the "Check Email" link next to the email:
You will have a few different options of how to manage your email through Bluehost's partners:
Personally I'm not a huge fan of any of these interfaces, so for the rest of the tutorial I'll show you how to set everything up in Outlook for PC - but the steps will also work for Mail 10 on PC.
Connecting your new email into Outlook to organize your emails nicely
We are in luck - Microsoft Outlook (and Mail) are both able to automatically configure your new email addresses, so there are only a few steps here:
Step 1: Open Outlook
Step 2: Go to File, Account Information, and Click Account Settings
Step 4: In the Account Settings pop up, click New under the email tab to add a new email address.
Step 5: Simply write in your email address and click Connect
Step 6: Sometimes this will work perfectly and you will be done, but in this case I got an error message 🙁 That's ok! Let's keep on by clicking Change Account Settings
Step 7: Select IMAP to set up your email address settings
Step 8: Enter your Email Password
Step 9: Sweet Success! You can also get the Outlook Mobile app on your phone to sync everything up (personally I use the default iOS mail app but they both work great)
You're ready to rock with your free professional email setup!
If you've followed along, you should now be able to access your new email account from your Outlook dashboard.
You can both send and receive emails from here, and you should feel just a little bit fancier in the process.
Now go build your business! And leave a comment if this was helpful 🙂
Video Transcript
Video Transcript
Hey everybody how's it going John here from in kamesh calm I just came back from my little four year olds VPK graduation she's going into kindergarten next year she's gonna be a big girl and it got me thinking is it time for you to upgrade and graduate from your old at gmail.com email address and really take hold of your new brand your new domain name if you're blogging on WordPress but you're still sending out emails to your leads or just to your audience with your at gmail.com email address it's time for you to graduate as well and in today's video I'm going to show you exactly step by step using Bluehost the host that I recommend how to set it your professional email address using your own domain name I will also go ahead and show you how to integrate that in with Outlook Microsoft Outlook if you're using that for your windows-based computer I think they have a Mac version as well I'll show you how to set that up so you can check all your emails send your emails look way more professional and also increase your productivity at the same time okay let's go ahead and dive in and get graduated with our new website here so here I am at Bluehost comm and if you're using a different web host and you've struggled to get this accomplished in the past you can head over to in kamesh comm slash Bluehost let's just go ahead and go there real quick if you go to income mesh comm slash Bluehost that is my affiliate link and you will be welcome to buy my beautiful wife and daughter she was our new graduate here today and you'll be able to sign up for 295 per month for your web sites and your email hosting it's a very very good deal go ahead and check that out but assuming you're here in Bluehost what you want to do to set up your email address is head down to email and office and this is assuming that you already have set up your own domain name so if your if you have a blog you've written a few blog posts and you have that domain name this is what we're going to do we're going to create an email address that you'll be able to send from your name or hello or one of those types of you know usernames at your domain name comm and I'll link in the description a full blog post that walks through this step-by-step as well okay so now you're here in your email and office and yours will obviously look different than mine but this will have the list of all the domain names you have in your possession at the time and you'll be able to manage or upgrade email you don't need to upgrade let me show you exactly what we're going to do here what we're gonna do is click on manage and then it will take you over to this email accounts page here and this page is going to show you all of your email addresses that you've currently set up for your own website but you'll also be able to create new ones here so if we look over here on the right-hand side you'll see a create button so we'll go ahead and click that create button and then you'll be able to select which domain name you want that email to be created for so for example my you know root domain for this account is Jai waetford com but let's say I want to create a website for all right an email address for one of my fun web sites called home of bacon com so I'll go here to home of bacon comm and I will call this support at home of bacon com this as easy as that I'll enter in a password don't take my password guys and make sure you know what that password is because you'll be using it later in the tutorial alright and then storage space I have unlimited space here with my Bluehost account but you can decide to partition and maybe say you want to give one gigabyte or 500 megabytes I'll leave it here as a default 500 megabytes but just know that unlike some other services where you have infinite space your hosting plan may be different so just make sure that you give yourself enough space for your email alright and then I'll go ahead and leave this checked on where it says send a welcome email with instructions to set up a mail client and I'll go ahead and click create right here okay and a few things are going to pop up here and now we have our new support at home of bacon comm website or email address created so there's a couple things you can do here you could be done right now and you have this created let me just find it here in the list there we go so here is support at home of bacon so if you wanted to check your email you can just click this button here that says check email this is not the way I recommend doing it but this is the easiest way for everyone to get there and then you have these three different options score home mail roundcube forward I don't use any of them I can't really recommend any of them but they all work for basic checking and receiving of email so you can see here I have my configuration set up and this was the email that was sent to me when the email was created on Bluehost what I'm going to show you next though is the best way to do it which is if you want to connect additional devices so if you want to have your email checked from your iPhone or from your Outlook computer like I'll show you here you can click on connected devices and as we scroll down here you'll see all these different things all these different programs that your email can work with so here if you don't have Outlook you can use mail for Windows 10 for example Outlook Live Mail iOS mail or iPhone all that stuff so we're good to go here and as you can see there's different protocols you don't need to know any of this just follow along here but what we see here is a mail and outlook our auto-discovery so what that means is we're gonna have a really easy time of setting this up let me go ahead and switch over now to my outlook client so as we see here I'm in Outlook let me make this smaller for the window already so when you're ready to bring this email address in here you can see I have several email addresses that are tying in and the vast majority of these are hosted on Bluehost mail servers so we're going to do is go to file account settings and click on account settings and here you can see all the different email addresses that have been created we're gonna go ahead and click new right here and then you can type in that new email address that we just created so I'll do support at home of bacon comm and I'll just go ahead and click connect it's gonna think for a little bit here and it might give you an issue and we'll work around that in just a second okay so it says something went wrong and that's okay if you know just we just put in our email address we never put our password in so what we're gonna do here is go to change account settings and when we click that you'll have a couple different options to set it up and we want to make this an eye map email so we'll click on the IMAP email and then it'll ask us to put our password in so I told you to write it down or remember it so I'll put the password in that I set up on Bluehost and I'll click connect and now boom account successfully added and it'll offer you to do more you can also set up Outlook mobile on your phone as well but I'll skip that for now for this email address I'm fine having it just on my computer okay so now I'll go ahead and click close and let me go and find that email address here so we've got support at home of bacon com you can see quickly that we've received that email from from blue house with our configuration settings and we can also send a new email from support at home of bacon okay so super super simple creating that email address and linking it up to your computer can take five minutes at that when you're really just clicking through it you can mate as many as you want for different purposes so if you want your company or your brand to seem bigger you can have community support at home of Aegon comm and affiliates at home of bacon comm and they can all email to you but that could help you kind of keep your things organized and straight forward it can also help your customers at knowing where they need to go for their specific question if this was helpful go to hit that subscribe button he'll give me a like and leave me a comment on what you liked about this if you use you know G suite for your email hosting that's totally fine as well this is an option that gets you up and started with your existing hosting account and if you don't need some of the features of G suite this is a good way to go as well so I'm John from in commercial comm I'll see you guys in the next video and thank you for watching
John Whitford is an entrepreneur who has built over 12 profitable online blogs and businesses. He's also the founder of Unbeatable Tech, a data-driven digital marketing company that specializes in sales funnel implementation for both his own businesses and clients alike. John loves to be a beach bum while brainstorming new ideas for marketing strategies, but he's always excited to take on another project!
