Tag Archives: professional

Personal email in a print ad – personal touch or lack of professional attitude?

I started out replying to this question on LinkedIn

In every print ad it is common to give some contacts for a consumer – be it a website address, infoline number or general email (info@company (product).com). What about email address with name and surname of a brand manager? Does it look unprofessional, or on contrary – gives a sense of credibility and personal touch

but thought of posting my answer in form of a blog post.

So here’s the deal:

While most people who read this or commented on this question might feel/say that they are more likely to respond to a firstname.lastname@company.com than to info@company.com, I don’t think it holds true for me. On the contrary I feel it’s better to have generic email ids for following reasons

1) It gives you a sense of knowing what you are getting into:
While a “firstname.lastname@company.com” might be more personal, it definitely doesn’t tell you about the role/designation the guy holds or if you are asking the right question to the right guy.

2) Easy to remember:
While firstname.lastname@company.com might look and sound good, what people don’t realize is that it’s difficult to remember these email ids. For ex: If every company whose products you use started giving people’s names as ids for things like support would you be able to remember even a few of them ? No, on the other hand think if each one of those companies had an email id like help@company.com or support@company.com. Isn’t this a lot easier to remember and share ?

3) Ease of management:
While giving personal email id’s is not a big deal but it might not be a practical deal, especially for big brands. I for sure know that I won’t be able to handle if I start getting hunderds of emails per day. The way these email accounts are maintained(mostly) is that the emails to them gets forwarded to everyone whose part of the support team or alternatively is assigned to a member from support team. Supporting that sort of thing would be difficult unless you make a fake account and give it out rather than giving email id of a real user.

These are a few points that I could think of in support of using a generic email id.

What do you think about this and why you think that way ?