A Gmail or Hotmail address on your business card or website sends a message you probably do not intend. Here is why it matters and how easy it is to fix.
Every point of contact with a potential customer is an opportunity to build or undermine confidence in your business. Your email address is one of those points of contact, and it carries more weight than many business owners realise.
An email address ending in @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, or any other free consumer email service tells the recipient — consciously or not — that the business has not invested in basic professional infrastructure. For some customers, particularly businesses considering spending significant sums with you, it raises a question about how established and serious the business really is.
A professional email address — one that ends in your own domain name, such as info@yourbusiness.co.uk — communicates the opposite. It signals that the business is properly set up, that it takes its professional image seriously, and that it is not going anywhere.
Emails sent from free consumer addresses to business contacts are more likely to be filtered into spam or junk folders, particularly when sending to corporate email systems with strict filtering. A domain-based email address sent from a properly configured mail server is significantly more likely to arrive in the recipient's inbox.
Using a personal Gmail account for business means your business correspondence, customer data, and professional communications are mixed with personal email. This creates both practical confusion and potential issues with data handling — particularly under UK GDPR, where personal data held on behalf of customers should be kept appropriately separate and secure.
A free email account belongs to the provider, not to you. It can be suspended, hacked, or have its terms changed without notice. If Google suspends your Gmail account — for any reason — you lose access to every email, every contact, and every piece of business correspondence stored in it, immediately and potentially permanently. A business email hosted on your own domain, with your own hosting provider, gives you far greater security and control.
As your business grows, you may want separate email addresses for different purposes or different members of staff — sales@, accounts@, support@, or named addresses for individual employees. None of this is possible with a free personal email account. A domain-based email setup allows you to create as many addresses as you need.
A professional business email address uses your own domain name after the @ symbol. Common formats include:
The domain used for email should match your website domain. Having a website at yourbusiness.co.uk but an email at yourbusiness@gmail.com is an inconsistency that observant customers will notice.
If you already have a domain name and web hosting, adding email is usually straightforward and inexpensive — in many cases it is included in your existing hosting package. Your hosting provider or web designer will be able to set this up for you.
If you do not yet have a domain name, registering one is the first step — a .co.uk domain typically costs around £10 per year. Email hosting can then be added on top, either through your web hosting provider or through a dedicated service such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, both of which provide professional email on your own domain alongside productivity tools.
Switching to a professional email address is one of the lowest-cost, highest-impact improvements most small businesses can make to their professional image. It takes very little time to set up and the ongoing cost is minimal — typically a few pounds per month at most.
Once set up, a professional email address can be accessed in exactly the same way as a free email account — on your phone, your computer, or via a browser. There is no learning curve and no disruption to how you work day to day.
