Why you should use different email addresses for marketing and operations

As a business you’re probably sending out a lot of emails on a daily basis. And quite often there are also different types of emails being send out from your company domain.

More often than not I see businesses use the same email address for all types of email communications. There is however a very good case to be made to not do this.

Let’s say you are managing IT for a hotel chain and right now any emails regarding reservations or marketing are being send out from no-reply@thegrandduvet.com.

First of all, never use a no-reply email address, this is basically just telling your customer to f off. You should have a decent system in place to manage incoming emails anyway.

The case from the customer’s perspective

But that aside, I feel this one email approach is less than ideal for a multitude of reasons. For the customer it becomes very hard to sort these emails. For example, for my personal email I am using Hey email to automatically sort my emails based on importance. Urgent emails land in my inbox, marketing emails go into my feed and any receipts go into ‘Paper trail’ which is basically the digital version of a receipt shoe box. And last but not least, for the most important types of emails I will allow push notifications.

This example is for Hey email, but this system of sorting emails is something I do in Google Workspace (Gmail) as well.

The thing is, if your company is using one email for everything it becomes really hard to manage this from a customer’s perspective.

The case from the company’s perspective

There is also a very good case to be made from the company’s perspective however.

Let’s stick with the example of our hotel, The Grand Duvet, and see what their email structure could look like:

• Marketing for the NYC location: nyc@marketing.thegrandduvet.com
• Transactional emails for the NYC location: nyc@ops.thegrandduvet.com
• General support for the NYC location: nyc@service.thegrandduvet.com
• Personal email accounts for staff: jane.doe@thegrandduvet.com

There are couple of advantages to using this setup:

1. Your customers will be able to easily sort your emails.
2. You will be able to easily use different email systems for different parts of the business, like customer service.
3. By using subdomains for the automated email systems, your main domain is protected in the event anything goes wrong with one of those systems, harming only the respective subdomain.
4. You don’t have to use a no-reply email address since any replies can easily be routed to the right place.

I now used the example of a hotel, but this is the case for an e-commerce business just as well. At the very least you should make the separation between personal email accounts, transactional email accounts and operational email accounts. It will make everyone’s lives easier, trust me.