To make sure people engage with your emails, it's important that you choose a sender email address they can instantly recognize and associate with your business.
Free vs. private email addresses
It's important that you understand the differences between free and private email addresses when sending emails from your BookBooster account.
Benefits of private email addresses
- Helps avoids spam filters
- Increases open and click rates
- Builds trust with your subscribers
- Strengthens your brand and sender reputation
Both your sender reputation and the performance of your campaigns will be impacted by the type of sender email address you use. That's why we recommend you always use a private email address to send emails from your BookBooster account.
Using a private email address will help establish a strong sender reputation with your subscribers and with the internet service providers that receive and process process your emails, helping to boost the performance of your campaigns. You'll also be able to authenticate the domain associated to your private email address with BookBooster. This will help improve the delivery of your emails even more and protect your business from email spoofing, which is when a malicious party intends to mislead email recipients by impersonating you or your business.
Limitations of free email addresses
- Lowers open and click rates
- Increases spam complaint rates
- Increases unsubscribe rates
- Leaves you vulnerable to spoofing
To give your emails the best possible chance of reaching the inbox you should never use a free email address to send emails from your BookBooster account.
Thanks to services like Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook, anyone can create a free email address at any time. While these free email addresses are great for personal use, they make it impossible for the ISPs receiving the email to verify if it's being sent on behalf of a legitimate business. This means there is a better chance that your emails end up in the spam folder instead of the inbox where they belong. It's not just ISPs that are critical of the emails you send, your subscribers are as well. Inboxes are personal spaces that people are protective of so it's important that your emails are seen as trustworthy and professional which is hard to pull off when they're sent using a free email address.
Best practices when choosing a sender email address
Use a valid email address
A valid email address is required by BookBooster and even by some of the ISPs that receive your emails. This means you must be able to access the inbox and verify any email address you plan on using to send emails from BookBooster.
Try aligning it to the content
It helps to give subscribers an idea of what you're sending them by aligning your sender email address to the type of content they'll be receiving. As an example, if you send both marketing emails and transactional emails, a good way to align your sender email address to the content would be to use newsletter@ or promotions@ for your marketing emails, and billing@ or support@ for your transactional emails. If you're concerned about having to manage all these email addresses, you can use a single reply-to email address to centralize all of the emails being sent to you within a single inbox.
Avoid no-reply email addresses
Keep the door to conversation open with subscribers that want to connect with you. The more engagement you have with your subscribers the better your chances of retaining them as customers in the long run. Using a no-reply email address doesn't just affect the people that need to reach you about something, even your quieter subscribers can find them impersonal, creating a negative association with your brand.
Start using a private email address to send emails from BookBooster
I already have a private email address
If you already have a private email address that's associated with your business or website, simply create a new sender to add and verify your existing private email address with BookBooster.
I don't have a private email address yet
If you already have a website but don't have a private email address yet, you'll need to log in to your domain provider's website and set up a new email address. If you're not sure how to do that, contact the person or team that manages your website and asks them to help you set up a new email address.
1. Log in to your domain provider's website
2. Set up a new private email address
3. Create a new sender to add and verify your new private email address with BookBooster.
I don't have a private email address or a website yet
If you don't have a website yet, you'll need to purchase a domain first and then set up your private email address.
1. Choose a domain provider and purchase a domain
- Make sure they offer helpful customer support to assist you with setting up your domain and email addresses
- Make sure it includes WHOIS Privacy so that your contact info is safe
- Be sure you have full control over your domain name, in case you wish to switch services.