How to Set Up Professional Business Email: A Guide for Small Businesses

An email address like hello@yourbusiness.co.uk does more than look professional. Set up properly, it’s the difference between emails that land in your customers’ inboxes and emails that quietly end up in spam.

This guide explains why a business address is worth having, the main options for small businesses, and the setup steps that are easy to miss but make all the difference.

Plenty of small businesses start out with a free Gmail or Outlook.com address, or the email that came with their broadband. It works, but it has real drawbacks:

• It looks less trustworthy. Customers are more cautious about invoices and quotes from a free or personal-looking address, and scammers use free addresses too.
• You don’t own it. Broadband email is tied to your internet provider. Switch provider and you can lose the address, or have to pay to keep it.
• It’s hard to hand over. If someone else takes over a role, or you bring in help, you can’t easily share or pass on an address that’s really your personal account.
• You can’t protect your name. With your own domain you can set up the security records that stop scammers sending email pretending to be you. With a free address, you can’t.

A professional email setup has two parts:

• A domain name — the part after the @, such as yourbusiness.co.uk. If you have a website, you probably already own one. If not, you can register one through a domain registrar for a small yearly fee.
• An email service — the company that actually runs your mailboxes. Your domain is then pointed at that service.

The two don’t have to come from the same company. It’s often better if they don’t, because it means you can change one without disturbing the other.

For most small businesses the choice comes down to three options:

• Google Workspace — business Gmail with your own domain. A good fit if you already like Gmail and work mostly in a web browser or on your phone.
• Microsoft 365 — business Outlook with your own domain. A good fit if you use Word, Excel and Outlook, or work with larger organisations that do. Some plans include the desktop Office apps.
• Email from your web host — many hosting packages include basic mailboxes. It can be fine for very light use, but features, spam filtering and support are usually more limited.

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both charge per user, per month. Both are reliable, and both work well when set up properly. The right choice is usually the one that fits how you already work.

You don’t need a paid mailbox for every address. Both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 let you add extra addresses, such as info@, sales@ or accounts@, that deliver into an existing mailbox, or into a shared mailbox several people can see.

A sole trader can often run a whole business from one paid mailbox with a few extra addresses. That keeps costs down without losing the professional look.

Creating the mailbox is the easy part. Making sure your email is trusted by other mail servers is where most setups go wrong. The key steps are:

• MX records — these tell the world where to deliver email for your domain. They point your domain at Google, Microsoft or your host.
• SPF — a record listing the services allowed to send email for your domain. You should only ever have one SPF record.
• DKIM — a digital signature added to every email you send. With both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 you usually have to switch it on yourself: it isn’t always active by default.
• DMARC — a record that tells other mail servers what to do with email that fails the checks above, and sends you reports about it.

If these terms are new to you, our plain-English guide to what SPF, DKIM and DMARC mean explains what each one does.

Your mailbox probably isn’t the only thing sending email with your name on it. Think about:

• your website, including its contact form
• accounting or invoicing software that emails invoices
• booking systems and online shops
• newsletter tools such as Mailchimp

Each of these needs to be allowed to send for your domain, usually by adding it to your SPF and DKIM settings. Miss one out and those emails are much more likely to go to spam. Website forms are a common example, and our guide on why contact forms stop sending emails explains the fix.

If you’re switching from an existing address, a little planning avoids lost messages:

• copy your old emails and contacts across before you change anything
• keep the old address running for a few months and forward it to the new one
• update your website, email signature, invoices, social media and business listings
• let your regular customers and suppliers know

Changing your domain’s MX records is the moment email starts arriving at the new service, so it’s best done at a quiet time, after everything else is ready.

Once your business email is up and running, it’s worth checking that everything is working as it should. Our step-by-step guide on how to check your email is set up correctly takes about ten minutes. If your emails are already landing in spam, start with why your emails are going to spam.

If you’d rather have it done properly for you, from choosing a service to switching on every security setting and testing it all, that’s exactly what we do.

Once you’re set up, email security for small businesses covers the settings worth turning on from day one.

Need help fixing this?

We provide:

• Free initial assessment
• Clear explanation of the issue
• Fixed-price solutions
• UK-based support

If you’d like your business email set up properly from day one, we can do it for you.