Why is a custom web domain important for your business branding needs?

Having a website is considered a standard pre-requisite for today’s businesses as it is likely the first place where people will enquire about the business and its offerings. While creating and hosting a website is no big deal today with the tons of ready to deploy template website builder services available, there is one element that you must focus from a branding perspective for an enterprise website. It is none other than a custom domain name. For example, if your business name is “John’s Giant Ice Cream”, then a website with URL as www.johnsgianticecream.com will be more appealing from a branding perspective than having one such as www.johnsgianticecream.wordpress or www.johnsgianticecream.blogger.com. The same logic applies to your enterprise email id as well. If you have an official email account that reflects your business name as the email domain rather than Gmail or Hotmail, it is better from a branding perspective.

Let us examine 5 benefits of branding that your business will experience if you have a custom website domain and email:

1. Brand Recognition

Having a co-branded domain such as wordpress.com/mybusiness would be harder to remember for customers than one such as www.mybusiness.com. This would make it easier for customers to pass information about your business to their friends verbally or via telephone calls. The element of simplicity in having a custom website and email URL will ensure that your customers, both existing and prospective, can reach out to you at the earliest, in case there is a need for them to avail of your services or buy your products.

2. Risk-Free Personalized Identity

From a business point of view, having a unique website and email domain would ensure that they have a unique existence. When you have a 3^rd party sponsored co-domain as your business’s web address, then there are chances that you may have to change them in the future depending on policies made by the service provider. The service provider could cease to exist due to other issues and your domain goes down with them thereby impacting the large presence you would have built over the years with that website. Considering the risks involved in such a scenario, a custom domain for your website and email makes sense for a secure and seamless future for your business with a personalized identity.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Building a simple website for your business’s online reach is not a very tough thing to do. But making it visible in search engine results with a high ranking takes a lot of effort. By having a custom website URL, it helps your website to rank better in search engine ranking algorithms that focus on uniqueness more than generic names and 3^rd party hosting service providers who append their names to your domain for free hosting. As such a unique URL is more likely to be shared on social media, they get better ranking credits on that front as well.

Read more: 5 Ways Virtual Private Server Make a Difference to Your Business’s Digital Future

4. Subdomain Flexibility

Very often you might face the need to create subdomains within your website to have separate showcase pages for a particular service or marquee product. When you do not have a custom domain for your business, the concept of subdomains becomes even more complex. In most 3^rd party hosted domain services, you do not even get that option to include further subdomain on your website. This further reduces your organic SEO efforts and also makes it harder for customers to trust your unique offerings and learn more information about them from the subpage.

Read more: 5 Tips to Select the Ideal Web Hosting Partner

5. Email Credibility

One of the biggest advantages of having a custom business domain for your web landscape is the ability to have a unique email domain. When contacting customers or prospects, having a genuine business name domain as the extension of your email address will add more credibility. From a receiver’s point of view, they will feel more genuineness in your business for the effort you took in creating a unique domain name for your website and email communication address rather than opting for a free service like Gmail or Hotmail. A professional email address is also a unique credential for your business to avail of multiple digital services available online today that helps in boosting your internet-based business services. Examples include payment gateways, information forms, cloud storage options, and much more.

Read more: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

Set up your professional custom domain and private email with InfinCE

If you are a business owner wanting to have a unique identity on the internet with a website and email, then you should definitely explore the option of a custom domain rather than opting for free hosting service providers. 

The several benefits in branding and customer experience you stand to enjoy as outlined above will be instrumental in growing your business in the coming years as more customers rely on internet-powered digital channels for their daily needs. 

Having a powerful digital ecosystem with credible domain and secure hosting infrastructure is the need of the hour especially for small and medium businesses. This is where InfinCE can be the ideal companion for your success. Get in touch with us to see how you can build and deploy a comprehensive web-based business online with custom URL and professional email service with InfinCE in a matter of days.

How retail marketers can create more dynamic and engaging email content

Email marketing is here to stay, at least for the next decade or so. Statista reports that by 2023 there will be over 4.3 billion active email users globally. Retailers have been using emails as a powerful means to convince shoppers to return for bigger purchases and also to cross-sell based on their customers’ purchasing history. The scenario did not change pretty much when e-commerce started to dominate the retail world.  However, now the challenge that retailers face with their email marketing strategies is to develop interactive and engaging content that can drive conversions from the target audience. So how can you make your retail marketing emails more interactive and engaging?

Here are a few ideas that could help you out:

1. Focus on personalization

Personalization is one of the best ways to bring more engagement in any conversation, be it across any channel and email is no exception. Across the globe, surveys have shown that over 33% of all marketers believe that personalization is the most important capability to have in their customer outreach strategy. By tailoring your marketing email to suit the unique needs and preferences of each recipient, the chances of them trying to glance at your content and further initiate a positive response are high. Leading companies use technology such as big data analytics to gain insights for delivering personalized experiences via email marketing.

Related Reading: How to choose an email service provider for your small business?

2. Identify the right audience

While personalization is a great way to connect with customers or potential customers, it is just one side of a coin that will help you. The other is identifying the right audience for an interactive email campaign. Sales or marketing personnel who organize such email campaigns should be able to segregate and create separate lists of target email recipients for each copy based on information from their CRM system. The list may be classified based on several factors such as time zone, preferences, spending budget history, demographics, regional and personal specialty time periods and much more. The better the segregation, the easier it will be the task of content creators to build more personalized email content.

3. Intelligent Cross-Sell

Brands need to make it a point to follow up on customer purchases with cross-selling opportunities. For example, if a person books an air ticket, an email giving the option for them to choose their seat should be sent within a very short time span after the booking for gauging more interest. The email sent for seat selection can either be interactive and allow the user to select the seat from the email itself or it can simply provide a link to a landing page that has an interactive seat map for the user to view and choose accordingly. The key factor here is the near real-time email marketing that will do the trick and land more monetization opportunities for the business.

4. Mobile Friendly

Did you know that 49% of all emails are opened on a smartphone? Hence, irrespective of the content you stuff in an email, it is important to visualize how it will appear in a smartphone display before you shoot out the campaign to recipients. By limiting the scrolls a user has to make and giving them an action item in the first sight, you have more chances of getting them to interact with the email.  Fonts, buttons, and other interactive elements should be designed to be more responsive in smartphone screens and the entire email should be light in size to load completely. Delays would drive away users be it on smartphones or in desktop browsers.

5. Embedding Rich Media

One of the best ways to engage recipients is to include rich media. This could be a visually appealing image or a short video that can be played within the email interface or an interactive survey or poll. A catchy email subject line can bring in more views for the rich media content and if your media are intuitively planned and executed, it will incite more responses from your target audience. Several leading companies use email as their primary mode of gauging feedback from their customers and often publish their survey results or individual feedback (with consent) as a testimony for their offerings. This will improve their loyalty perception in the market and will ultimately lead to more organic sales revenue.

For retail marketers, interactive retail marketing emails will be one of their most critical assets to gain new customers and improve sales. This is one of the key reasons, why your business needs to have a powerful digital platform like INFINCE to handle key operations such as customer relationship and marketing. With intelligent marketing automation and CRM capabilities, INFINCE can empower retail marketers to win more customer hearts with interactive emails. Get in touch with us to know more.

Why Your Startup Org Needs A Professional Email Account

The disruptive gains made by several first-time entrepreneurs in the areas that were once dominated by the big fishes in the industry have given way to the age of startups. However, with the rise in popularity, it is likely that every idea you have for a startup will be probably thought of by another person or team as well. Therefore, today you have multiple startups working in the same domain with tight competition. Here is where every element that makes your startup unique from the rest can be a game-changer or decider of success. 

While innovations in business models, monetary backup and investment, pricing schemes are all key elements in making your startup stand out in the long run, there are a few marketing elements that could make an impact immediately. Your business email is a prime example of such a marketing entity that can re-define your first impressions in the market.

Once you have decided upon a name and launched a website in your name domain, the next important thing to do is to set up a professional business email account with your domain name. Many startup founders make the mistake of using a free email service in the beginning and reach out to customers or investors for deals. You need to be professional from day one to create a better experience for every stakeholder you reach out to, including your customers, investors or other prospective talents who you wish to hire for your team. 

Here are 4 reasons why you should have a professional business email account for your startup from day one:

1. Personalized Experience

It is expected that by 2023, the average number of emails that will be sent daily will be around 347 billion worldwide. Your startup’s marketing email or customized investor pitch will be one among them and should you choose a regular free email service like Gmail or Outlook without your domain in the email address, then chances are that you will likely fall out of the 17.92% of emails that are opened every day. 

A personalized email from a business email account is more likely to be opened by a prospect as they would expect it to have something valuable to offer. The content in your email is a topic for another discussion that we are keeping for some time else. The domain name itself can create a sense of personalized branding experience which will improve your acceptance rates in the market significantly.

2. Improves Credibility

Did you know that amongst the millennial generation, nearly 68% have agreed that promotional emails have influenced their purchasing decisions on various occasions? This is a wake-up call for startups to start promoting their business through email campaigns. But then comes the question of credibility. 

How can you ensure that prospective customers will open and respond to your promotional email? 

Related Reading: Top 5 Productivity Tools Every Small Business Needs Today

Having an email account with your business name’s domain at the end surely helps in this regard. People have a natural tendency to ignore promotional emails from generic free email services like Gmail. This happens even if you have a great subject line to catch attention or even better promotional content in the body. The impression that the brand has its own website and business email account is vital for establishing the right contact in the first instance.

3. Provides Flexibility for Future Expansion

In due course of time, your startup is expected to grow into a sizeable business with a possibility of numerous subdivisions. If you have a professional business email account rather than a free one, then it is very easy to set up sub-groups within the main email account in your domain. It will ensure that every sub-function or department in your business has a unique identifying email subdomain for better internal mail management and communication. Additionally, this allows external stakeholders like customers, partners, and vendors to reach out to the right department when they need support. 

For example, customer service requests may be directed to an email account like “[email protected]” for faster responses. Investors may reach out to “[email protected]” for their dedicated information hotline and much more. Today there are cloud-based service providers that offer unlimited expansion in subdomain email accounts under your main domain on a subscription basis. These ensure that your overall costs stay under control and you only pay for what you use be it storage or number of users.

Related Reading: 5 Digital Capabilities Every Small Business Needs To Invest In 2020

4. Higher Security

We are not saying that generic free email clients available today are insecure but as far as a business is concerned, their email systems often handle sensitive and confidential customer and business information. So, an extra layer of security is always needed to safeguard the system from cyber threats. Dedicated business email clients offer this added layer of security for your business email and ensure that file exchange, data and user management is seamlessly secured by encryption and other security standards. Effective rights management controls to ensure that no unauthorized communication happens from your business email account and prevents leakage of sensitive data through emails.

5. How InfinCE Can Help

A professional business email is a startup organization’s first asset to begin scouring for resources, be it customer deals, investor communications for funding and vendor communications. To get the first impressions right, it is absolutely vital to have a secure and powerful business email platform incorporated in your own domain. Successful businesses rely on platforms like InfinCE to set up their entire digital ecosystem from websites to business emails and intra-organizational information management. Our suite of applications running in the cloud allows you to build the most secure and flexible digital framework for your startup. From setting up a professional email account for your small business to manage user rights, InfinCE has a host of features designed exclusively for startups and small businesses to start their digital journey. Get in touch with us to know more.