Like it or not, the game industry suffers from an image problem. It doesn’t take much to fix your email. Here’s why you should.
Credibility
You have a home repair project, so you search locally and find 2 plumbing companies. One has an email address called “Bob@BobsPlumbing.com” and the other is “JoePlumber14565@yahoo.com.” Given no other information, who would you email first? Psychologically, this is an easy answer – you email the owner who took the care and effort to create a professional-sounding URL.
Yes, this won’t matter to everyone. But even if it just made the decision for 5% of your potential new customers, that would be worth it.
Branding
Lots of little stores pop up and go out of business within their first 18 months. Getting yourself in front of potential customers, getting them to learn your name and think of you first, is a real challenge. Having a custom email domain is just one more little way to win this battle.
Staff Turnover
If you want, you can give every staffer a custom email,have it forward to their email of choice, and and customers will never know the difference. Then, when your staffer moves on to another job, your company doesn’t have to worry about them having access to privileged data, customer lists, or your business’ identity.
Maybe this doesn’t matter now because your business is just you. One day though, when you’ve grown and hired a few people, it could matter a lot. Better to build the foundation now, than wish you had after your first disgruntled employee sends a stream of profanity from an email account associated with your store.
It’s easy
And you can likely forward to your free email provider of choice. Just Google “setting up a custom domain with [your free email provider here]” and within the first few hits will be a step by step guide.