Professional email: why an info@ .be address sells more

Customers judge your business rapidly through small signals, including your email address. Research from 2025 shows that 75% of consumers consider an own-domain address important for trusting a small business. Three in four potential customers therefore judge what follows the at sign.

The reasoning is logical. An address on your domain proves investment in your business, that you are findable and accountable and that email belongs with your website. Anyone, including a fraudster, can create a free address in two minutes. Phishing is precisely the problem Belgians encounter daily: in early 2026, over 40.000 phishing messages were reported daily in Belgium. Consumers are rightly cautious about unidentifiable senders.

The difference is measurable and larger than you might expect:

• 77% of consumers trust businesses with own-domain addresses, while 64% have little or no trust in businesses using free email.
• The same research finds emails from free domains are ignored up to 35% more often than recognisable business addresses.
• 58% of consumers hesitate to share sensitive information with businesses communicating through free addresses, such as addresses, payment details or quote documents.

Do the calculation. If you email ten quotes weekly and three or four fewer are opened or trusted purely because of your sender address, that free address costs real revenue every month. For the price of two coffees monthly, you close that leak.

Another less visible advantage is better delivery from your domain. Spam filters now mainly assess the sending domain's reputation and identity. With your domain, you build that reputation and configure proof that messages really come from you. A free address shares its fate with millions of other users and never lets you fully claim that identity.

The statistics show the difference: senders without correct domain settings see 22 to 34% of emails land in spam, versus 5 to 10% with correct setup. Your domain is therefore more than cosmetic: it underpins reliable email, particularly if you later send newsletters or shop confirmations.

Good news: this is among the cheapest ways to professionalise.

• A .be domain costs around 10 to 20 euros annually. You probably already own one for your website.
• Email on that domain typically costs 2 to 5 euros monthly per mailbox at a Belgian hosting provider. To keep the familiar Gmail or Outlook environment, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 connect your domain to their interfaces for around 6 to 12 euros per user monthly.
• Switching takes an afternoon: create the mailbox, forward your old address, update your signature and inform regular contacts.

Altogether, for less than 100 euros annually, you email like an established business rather than a hobby project.

Switching is straightforward, but these pitfalls recur:

1. Continuing to reply from the old address. Set an automatic reply on Gmail or Hotmail and forward everything to the new mailbox. Always reply from the new address.
2. Using different addresses everywhere. Choose a consistent structure, such as info@ and optionally firstname@ for employees, across website, invoices, van and social media.
3. Closing the old address immediately. Keep it forwarding for at least a year; some customers and services always retain the old address.
4. Creating info@ and never reading it. An unanswered professional address is worse than no address. Ensure someone checks daily.
5. Skipping technical settings. Immediately ask your provider to configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC, proving messages come from you and preventing the new address landing in spam.

Another often-forgotten reason: controlling your domain lets you protect it. Criminals increasingly impersonate small businesses, whose domains research finds are around four times less likely to be fully protected against impersonation than large-company domains. Correct settings allow forged messages in your name to be rejected before reaching a customer. Free addresses lack that control: anyone could register yourbusiness2@gmail.com tomorrow and approach your customers.

Your address therefore combines a business card, identity, delivery reputation and protection.

Your email address is among the signals customers use to judge you, alongside your website, visibility and reviews. Want to discover where you fall short today? Take Marketing Scan's free marketing scan. Within minutes, you see how trustworthy and visible your business appears online, with practical improvements to start immediately.