An email address has become an essential part of everyday life. We use emails for everything from receiving critical updates from work, signing up for social sites, and even communicating with people. If you have friends who prefer to communicate through emails and to rant out to you through this platform, then you perfectly understand what I am talking about.
Can you imagine if some of the things you communicate with your friends got into the wrong hands? Or if your personal information leaked? It can be disastrous! In a survey conducted by egress, a leading email service provider, it showed that email is one of the leading tools for accidental ate leaks. Also, another study has shown that close to 150 emails weekly are sent to the wrong recipients for some reason.
So, ever considered more than one email accounts? In this fast-paced digital age, having numerous email accounts is vital, especially if you have an active social life. It is essential to separate professional work, personal life, and pleasure. Good thing about email addresses is they are easy to set up, free, and there is no limit whatsoever to how many you can have. If you have been thinking in these lines, here are some reasons you need to have more than one email account!
- Separate business from personal life
Keeping a clean record is essential for your professional life. One such way to do so is through a business email address. You will need a strictly business email address for your work issues, business association, colleagues, clients, and other contacts you made through work. Your work or business email should never be used for personal or social reasons. One small mistake, such as sending your best friend’s email to your boss, can costs you dearly. A proper email address should be one that advertises your name and company or association you work for without putting you in harm’s way. Avoid relic email handles that sound cynical when looking for a professional email address as it can be a turn off for clients. You don’t have to go crazy. Just keep it subtle and serious.
- Manage your personal affairs
A personal email address is crucial for maintaining your private and confidential personal matters. You can keep some affairs away from your colleagues, clients, and the general public with your individual email address. Such an email account should be confined to close family members and friends only. Avoid using your personal email for social sites or professional work since this email is limited to a few people. You can use your surname or first name in the name.
- Financial matters
Money matters are susceptible, and putting all your eggs in one basket can be detrimental. Many companies nowadays sell people’s personal information even though it’s not legal. So, imagine if you have a single email account that carries your personal info, work data, linked with your credit cards, and signed up for notifications. You can lose everything! It is crucial to maintain an email account that is specially reserved for your financial matters and bank accounts. As an advanced security measure, you can use a completely different browser or computer to access this email account. It will help to reduce the chances of a security breach.
- Running marketing campaigns
Statistics have shown that every dollar spent on email campaigns or marketing has an average return of $42. Gone are the days when social media platforms such as Facebook, SMS messaging, and texts were the only form of advertising. Maybe you have decided you want to be on the other side of spamming (joking), and you want to start sending out email campaigns. You will need to create a new email address as the sender. This will help you avoid getting bounce backs while sending out the emails. You also want to choose a name such as marketicgenius@mail.com to protect your email from getting cluttered or flooded with responses.
- Blogging and social networking
If you run a blog or similar business, having one email address is out of the picture. You will need to have an email address for each site or interaction you are expecting to email with. The excellent thing id most sites actually allow for site-specific email addresses for that specific site or reason. Having more than one email address will help you manage your online presence more effectively. You can also sign in n different social media platforms with different email accounts to protect your social life and personal life.
- Filter out the junk
Have you ever gone a while without checking your email, and the minute you open it, you are greeted with hundreds of messages? If you always provide your email address every time you make an online purchase, subscribe to random newsletters, or register for notifications on different websites, it’s only a matter of time before you have your hands full! Your inbox will be so full, and you will end up missing out on the critical emails.
Instead of using your time to sort out these emails in the degree of importance, the smarter move would be to have a separate email address for all your junk, spam, subscriptions, and registration. You can have one strictly for online purchases and sales notifications, at least that way you won’t miss out on an important sale. You can have another for signing up for newsletters on notifications.
- You may need to share account details
You may be in a situation that you are required to share your account t details for a service that is shared or registered under one account. You may be working in a team or with strangers. It is important to create a separate email account for such a situation.
Tips for different sign-in names for numerous email accounts
An email name is almost like your own brand. Recent research by an email service provider showed that at least 42% of people decide whether or not to open an email based on the name. The good thing about having more than one email account is you can have different names depending on the use of the email. That is, you can have a professional name for a work account and go all fun with your personal and socials email account.
Never make anything too obvious. If you are opening a work email account, it does not have to scream your names. Conceal your identity. However, take note that a work email account will look professional if it has your name in it. I would advise not to use all your full name. Get creative! You can add your job title or initials of your name.
If you are signing up for a work account, avoid funny prefixes such as love, awesome, and the likes. Although it may look good in your teens and 20’s, it can be rather unprofessional, and a source of embarrassment as age creeps in. Keep it simple but creative.
You should consider the times you want to remain anonymous. For instance, when you are participating in an online survey or discussion, an email name such as firstnamelastname@mail.com will not be very suitable. Some comments you may make while commenting on articles, or in online discussions may not look to good and may damage your image. While it’s important to be identifiable in a professional setting, an anonymous email address like pandabear@mail.com will let you express yourself freely without the need to look over your shoulder. You can go wild with such an email address.
Finally, you may be wondering how to manage all these accounts. The good news is some platforms such as Gmail allow you to create as many email accounts from your primary email account. So, when you receive emails from these secondary accounts, they will be received in your primary Gmail addresses.
So, if management is your concern, you can create filters for each email address associated with your primary address to organize emails from different websites and services. It’s like killing two birds with one stone because you manage all your emails while still maintaining high security for your email.
The crucial thing to do is ensure that when you are replying to either email, the right return email address should be the one in use; otherwise, you will compromise your security.
Finally, there is a whole bunch of email programs to consider while creating more than one email accounts. They include yahoo (not so popular with millennials), outlook, thunderbird, apple mail, Comcast, Gmail, among others you have probably never heard of. I would recommend Gmail because apart from being used by almost everyone, it offers great security features and has a great spam and spy wear system.
The only downside is you may be required to make a small monthly fee. Good thing is you can create as many email addresses from your primary email, and they will all seem the same. You can always check out more tips on the different email service providers to find one that fits you. The bottom line, however, is, if you’ve never, you need to consider more than one email address for the safety of your data!