Many churches faced with a shrinking budgets and attendance have been happy to find free options for official church email. Gmail, offered by Google, is one popular choice. No-cost options also are offered by Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and Outlook.
While these email services are free to use, there are hidden costs for using them. Those costs come in the form of email that is less trustworthy and less secure; email messages that too often end up in spam; an undermined brand/identity; and more. For official church communications, domain-based email provides a much better solition.
What is a domain-based email address?
A domain-based email address is an email address that uses your own domain name. For example, if your domain name is example.com, your domain-based email address could be john.doe@example.com.
Benefits of using a domain-based email address:
- Credibility: ANYONE can reserve a free email address with your church’s name in it and use that address to misrepresent you and create all kinds of mischief. But only YOU or someone with access to your web hosting account can get and use email addresses ending in yourdomain.org.
- Professionalism: A domain-based email address makes your ministry look more professional and credible. It shows everyone that you’re serious about your ministry and that you’re invested in your brand.
- Brand awareness: A domain-based email address is a great way to promote your brand. Every time you send or receive an email, your domain name will be visible to the recipient. This helps to increase brand awareness and make your business more memorable.
- Control: When you use a domain-based email address, you have control over your email account. You can create as many email addresses as you need, and you can manage them all from one central location. You can also set up custom email forwarding and filtering rules.
- Security: Domain-based email addresses are more secure than free email addresses. This is because we typically invest in more sophisticated security measures to protect our email servers.
- Reliability: Email addresses ending in Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, hotmail or AOL.com are more likely to be flagged as spam, so your intended recipients may never see your messages..
If you want to explore this topic in greater depth, here are a few resouces:
- Time to Ditch Gmail? Four Reasons Why Using a Domain Email Address Is Better for Your Business
- Benefits of Using Domain Name Email? (LinkedIn)
- Why Do Businesses Use Email Domains? (Streak.com)
- 11 Reasons to Use Your Own Domain Name (Legacy Media)
You’ll find hundreds of other articles on the subject. Just search Google (or your preferred search provider) to find more information.
Note: Google’s Artificial Intelligence solution, Bard, provided some of the information for this blog post.
