Free Marketing Content: Why Business Needs a Professional Email Address

A short while ago, Michael wrote a plea from Marketing inviting our Resellers to tell us what they need from us that would help them be more successful.

One of the requests was for us to craft some content around the positioning of free vs paid email accounts using domain names for end users. We took a couple of stabs at it, and along with input from you, we’ve produced this one pager you can use however you like. It’s available in our email marketing resources section.

Go ahead and customize it for your own brand, copy and paste into you website, whatever you like. And don’t forget we’re always here for you… tell us what you need and we’ll get on it!

Professional Email Addresses

A lack of trust and perceived professionalism can directly translate to lost revenue.

There are lots of ways you’ve worked to build positive brand and inspire trust with your clients. Pleasant phone greetings when client calls in, a professional sign over the office entrance, even stationary on a nice paper stock are important to let your clients know that you’re serious about your business.

But what about having your own domain name for email?

How does it look after a great conversation with a potential customer when you hand them your card and your email address you expect to have important business conversations with belongs to one of the big email providers offering free service?

Put another way, imagine a lawyer with an email address of consultantpat@hotmail.com. Do you think Pat’s clients would be comfortable knowing that private correspondence with their consultant was being transmitted through a free email service? How would their perception change if Pat’s email were pat@robinsonconsulting.com?

Professional branding aside, there are some great reasons to have your email at your own domain name for business email:

Who’s going to help? Delete an important email? Can’t log in to your account? Have a question about the number of email you can send from your account? The free email service providers have self-service tools to help you figure out your problem, but what can you do if you still have a problem? Who will you talk to and how long will you have to wait for help?

Will your emails be delivered? “I didn’t receive your email”. Does this sound familiar? Free email accounts are very popular with spammers. Did you know that some mail services started blocking mass mail delivery from free email accounts with these domain names?

The switching cost to a domain-based email address later is higher. There’s a strong benefit to having people know where to find you. Changing your email address can be a lot like a retailer relocating. All the business built over the years could disappear, as customers can no longer find you at the address.

Unintended communication could be embarrassing, even damaging. Jon Smith is our hypothetical accountant with a free GMail account at jon.smith@gmail.com. Can you guess the number of times his clients have emailed their sensitive financial documents (even tax returns) to john.smith@gmail.com? Sure, it’s the client’s fault for the mistake, but could this have been prevented if he were Jon@ReliableAccountants.com?

Free email accounts are very popular these days. But if you’re serious about your business and your brand, it might be time to consider how current and potential clients are judging you by a simple email address.

Call and talk to us. We’ll be more than happy to tell you how our services can help your business be more professional, starting today.

Sell Trustwave SSL and Win an iPad 2!

Between August 1, 2011 and September 30, 2011, we’re giving our Resellers a chance to win an iPad 2 and some other great prizes as part of a fantastic Trustwave SSL Incentive Program.

Here’s how the Incentive Program works:

Sell at least one Trustwave-branded SSL certificate during August or September, and you’ll automatically receive an entry into a random drawing for the Grand Prize of an Apple iPad 2 from Trustwave and OpenSRS!

Each Trustwave SSL certificate you sell earns you one entry, so the more you sell, the better your chances are to win! Everyone who sells an SSL certificate from Trustwave is automatically entered to win – there’s no signup required.

More Chances to Win

If you’re a first-time Trustwave SSL reseller, we’re going to give you even more chances to win! Sell your very first Trustwave SSL certificate in August or September, and we’ll give you an extra entry!

And for early birds, we’ll have a few surprise drawings sometime in August and September for those who get started selling right away. Stay tuned – we’ll be announcing those surprise draw winners through the OpenSRS Reseller Blog.

We’ll announce the Grand Prize winner of the iPad 2 in early October. Good luck to everyone!

OpenSRS Reseller Advisory Council. We’re Listening.

How often have you spoken with somebody and you can just tell that they’re not paying attention to what you’re saying? Their eyes look away for only a second, but that’s all it takes for you to know they’re just waiting for you to stop talking so they can blurt out whatever it is they want to say.

It can be frustrating for those with something to say because conversations are as much about listening as they are about talking.

Listening is silent. It doesn’t surprise and it will never shock. Perhaps that’s why talking has been so popular; It’s easy to keep a person’s attention while we’re making noise, isn’t it?

By listening, we can hear all about the challenges, the pains, frustrations, joys and successes of those we care about. We can empathize by listening and show that we care about all the little (and big) things going on with the people in our lives and the customers we talk to.

Recognizing that we wanted to become better listeners at OpenSRS, a few months ago, we launched a plan that would see the formation of the OpenSRS Reseller Advisory Council. It’s an initiative that begins tomorrow and it’s aimed at getting some of our smartest, creative, engaged Resellers to talk, while we listen.

What is the goal of the Council?

We created the Advisory Council with a specific purpose; to equip an underserved segment of our Reseller base with a voice that we can listen to. We plan to solicit their thoughts and benefit from their experience. We think we all have a lot to gain by doing this.

We’re going to listen to what the founding members have to say and do our best to tie what we hear to real business outcomes. The current plan is a conference call each quarter, with access to a private forum to continue the conversation after the calls. We may, depending on the needs of the group, create smaller committees to discuss, debate and come to the larger group with recommendations.

In the end, we’re going to move forward. It might be an inch forward, and not a mile to start with, but it will be a step forward.

The topics for the agenda were created from comments and answers given in the Advisory Council application form and we’re also crowd-sourcing additional topics and voting on the ones most important to the members. You can see the most popular agenda items at the right.

We don’t get to choose what to talk about, the members do.

How were the Council members chosen?

It started with an email to a couple thousand already engaged Resellers, inviting them to complete the application form. We had over 100 Resellers apply.

From there, we identified a group of 40 individuals, the majority of them senior executives, or company founders working at companies that have 100 to 1,000 domain names under management with OpenSRS.

If you completed an application form and did not hear from us, we’re sorry about that… you will soon. It’s not that we haven’t approved you, it’s just that we’re taking things a bit slow as we get started and another Reseller may have been a better fit this time around.

If you’re a reseller outside of North America, we’re running a separate Council (at least in the beginning), so we’ll be touching base with you to get the ball rolling. We’ll also be sharing what we learned from the first Council meeting.

Do you want to get involved?

Super! Let us know in the comments and we’ll follow-up as we run additional recruitment efforts. Be warned though, membership in the Council is not a free ride. There’s work involved and we’ll have high expectations of you if you’re accepted.

Here we go!

We’re really exciting about this initiative and it is our hope that the founding members of the Advisory Council will play a critically important role in helping us become better listeners as we continue our efforts to build the world’s most reseller friendly, super-focused provider of Domain Names, SSL and Email services!

OpenSRS Email Now Offers 5GB Standard

Starting today we’re upgrading all OpenSRS Email Service mailboxes to 5GB of storage at no additional cost.

There are two phases to the upgrade:

Effective today, new accounts you provision will automatically have 5GB of storage.
For existing accounts, beginning today, we’re going to start upgrading them from 2GB of storage to 5GB of storage. Getting all accounts upgraded might take a day or two, so feel free to tell your customers and users about the new storage quota, but please let them know they may not see the added space right away.

Share the News

You don’t need to do anything – the upgrades will happen automatically, and without any downtime or interruption in service.

Do enjoy the extra space and, by all means, let your customers know about the good news. Feel free to take all the credit, if you want. We don’t mind.

Important news about the OpenSRS Status Dashboard

Today, we’re very happy to announce that we have rebuilt the OpenSRS Status Dashboard with superhero powers!

Many of you are aware of the OpenSRS Status Dashboard. It’s our primary communications channel to tell you about upcoming maintenances and report (in realtime) any issues affecting our services.

For those of you not familiar, you should really check it out. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

There was just one thing that bothered us about the dashboard: we hosted it on our own infrastructure, using our own DNS. So while everything generally chugged along without issue, there have been a couple of instances where issues with certain parts of our infrastructure would take the dashboard offline.

For example a network event within a data centre, a problem with our DNS infrastructure, or even a failure to email would mean this dashboard might become unavailable, or cut off communications during the times when we most need to let you know what’s up.

Here’s a quick rundown of the main changes to your new dashboard:

A new domain name has been registered (opensrsstatus.com) that uses independent DNS services for resolution.
The webservers, data centre and all related network infrastructure is out-of-band and no components or services rely on our infrastructure.
More update options! In addition to the dashboard view, updates can be received via email, RSS and Twitter (via @OpenSRSStatus)

Since we launched the integrated Status Dashboard a few years ago, it’s become an integral tool for us to communicate with you during important events and we’re really excited about these changes.

Please take a moment to update your bookmarks to reflect the new domain name. We currently have a redirect in place so that status.opensrs.com will bring you to opensrsstatus.com, but if you don’t update your bookmarks, you could find yourself without status updates when you need them most.

Now, for the last time, go update your bookmarks! You’ll be glad you did.

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