9 reasons you should have more than one email address

Having one email address is okay for your personal account, but when it comes to work, it’s easy to get overloaded with more emails than you can manage. If you’re starting a business and wondering if having different email accounts will make your life easier, the answer is yes!

Different email accounts will let you organize distinct areas of your business into buckets, provide opportunities for better collaboration with colleagues, and help you protect yourself and your business from spammy practices and potential threats.

Let’s assume that you already have your own email domain (if you don’t, you can quickly set up Gmail for business via G Suite and pay for the same domain to be incorporated into your Gmail account). Below are 9 reasons to use multiple email accounts for your business, and some professional email address ideas to get you started.

First thing’s first: make sure that you have a “professional” sounding email address. If you’re still carrying around a relic email handle like drdeath@funmail.com from the early days of the Internet, it might be time to upgrade to something a bit more professional (albeit, a bit more boring). You don’t have to get too crazy with it either– something like your full name is more than enough to start off. If you have a complicated last name (guilty!), try sticking with just your first name. If you have your own domain, you won’t run the risk of that handle being taken.

Example

• firstname.lastname@yourdomain.com

• firstname@yourdomain.com

You want to be identifiable in a professional setting, but there are also times when you want to fly a bit under the radar. A ‘firstname.lastname’ email address might work for daily communication, but you don’t always want to identify yourself publicly. You might, for example, be participating in online conversations, commenting on articles, or writing reviews as part of your market research. In these cases, you might be more comfortable expressing yourself anonymously by using an alias email address. Here, you can go wild (although I’d still advise against using something like ‘drdeath’).

Example:

• community@yourdomain.com

If you need to sign up for a service but don’t want all of the promotional updates that come with it, sign up with a burner email address. Where there’s a risk of getting spammed by email marketing content, you can avoid clogging your inbox by registering for things with a designated ‘spam’ account, and then perusing it at your leisure. This is perfect for when you’re out of the office and need to register an email address to use WIFI in a public space, for example, or need to register to a website in order to access content.

Example:

• inbox@yourdomain.com

Speaking of spam, if you want to do some of your own spamming (kidding, of course) with an email marketing campaign using software such as SendinBlue or ActiveCampaign, you might want to come up with a different email address as the “from” sender. That way, if you’re sending out an email blast, you won’t get bounce backs in your inbox or be flooded with responses. Depending on what type of campaign you’re sending out (sales or marketing, for example), having a semi-generic email address will protect your inbox from getting too cluttered.

Example:

• marketing@yourdomain.com

Personal emails with yourname@yourdomain.com are good for one-to-one communication, but you might be understandably wary about posting a direct line of contact on your public-facing website. In this case, it’s good to have a generic email address, or even a web form, from where people can get in touch with any queries about your product or service. If you’re worried about checking more than email account, you can always set-up rules that will forward your emails from a secondary account to your main account.

Example:

• contact@yourdomain.com

• welcome@yourdomain.com

The great thing about smartphones is that they’re highly capable of managing more than one email account, sending you direct notifications for each without missing a beat. With mobile apps for email management, you can easily access and send emails from every account on your smartphone, making the whole organization process run a bit smoother.

If you’re working with teams, on projects or even hiring more people, you’ll have a ton of information coming in that’s meant for specific tasks or goals. Having a separate email address dedicated to these workflows makes sense; it’ll not only help you manage communication channels, but you can add more than one person to these email groups so that everyone has visibility into the communication coming in. This also makes it easier for contacting specific teams within the business.

Example:

• sales@yourdomain.com

• hr@yourdomain.com

8. You need to share account details

Shared email accounts can come in handy, especially if you’re using a product or service that’ll be registered under one account but will be used by more than one person. If you want to set-up a team login for your project management or marketing platform but don’t want to associate the login with your own account, setting up multiple email accounts will ensure that everyone has access that’s not associated with your own name.

Example:

• editorialteam@yourdomain.com

Email providers often secure your account from a lost password or unauthorized access by using a backup email for recovery. Keeping at least two email accounts ensures that you have a backup if you lose access to your main account. In the same vein, make sure that you choose different, strong passwords for each different email account. A password manager such as LastPass or Keeper can help you ensure you don’t forget all your login details.

Because email accounts are fairly easy to set up and there’s no limit to how many you can have, using multiple email addresses can actually speed up communication and processes instead of slowing them down.

Once you have your accounts set up and want to organize your inbox, you can start using an email management software to help you stay on top of your emails.

What next?

• Compare some of the best email management apps on GetApp

• Read reviews of the best email management app

• Check out different password managers to protect all of your email accounts