Will Bachman 00:02
You might want to just double check how your professional email address, the actual address appears in the inbox of recipients by sending yourself an email to one of your personal accounts. So, about five or 10% of emails that I receive, instead of seeing the sender’s first and last name, you just see just their email address. So you probably know how like when most of your emails come into your inbox, you see that person’s first and last name. But sometimes you don’t see that you just see the email address. And in some cases, you’ll see the first and last name, but there’ll be in like lowercase, or there’ll be some odd kind of case, they were typing quickly. And it’s like, cap, the first letter, first name, it’s, you know, a couple letters are capitalized, and it’s just capitalized wrong.

So, the impact of that is, every time you’re sending an email, you look a little bit unprofessional to every single recipient. You know, some people don’t care about lowercase, ee, Cummings, whatever. But some people, you know, maybe older people, they still want to see things you know, capitalized properly. So you just look like an idiot. It also adds a stumbling block. So when recipients are using an iPhone, and or I’m not sure about an Android, but possibly there as well. And they try to add contact directly. So in the email, if you click on someone’s email address, add contact, instead of your first and last names automatically populating in their contacts, just the email address shows up as the first name. And it makes it harder for the recipient to search for the for you in their inbox. And you may have some clever email where it’s just your first name at your firm, you know, it’s like Will at Bachman group.com, or we’ll at umbrex.com, something like that. If you’ve done that, then people may not be able to search for you by first and last name in their inbox so easily. If you haven’t done the following.
You can fix this whole problem by fixing your display name. And that just takes just a couple of minutes.

So I’ve included in the show notes, links on how to do that for users of Gmail or G Suite, as well as users of Microsoft. So typically, you just click you go into settings, and you’re just going to enter your display name and put in your first and last name there. If you’re not Gmail or Microsoft, whichever other program you’re using for your email, I’m sure you can just google you know how to fix display name on insert the name of your email program. So, it just appears more professional and takes two or three minutes. And then you’re done and create a better professional impression on every subsequent email you send.

Now, of course, you should not be using your personal email for consulting work. If you’re using Gmail or Yahoo or aol.com email address, I encourage you to go out and get a professional domain. And you can use GoDaddy or some other domain registrar to get yourself a domain. And then in less than 30 minutes, you can set yourself up with say, G Suite or Microsoft. In my survey of consultants, about two thirds of consultants that I know use G Suite, about one third use Microsoft and a tiny percentage use some other provider. So I’m not advocating any particular provider there. But that’s what I’ve seen people using. So fix your display name just takes a couple minutes. And you’ll look more professional forever after.

Thanks for listening. And if you go to umbrex.com slash unleashed, you can sign up for my weekly newsletter for subscribers of the show. I’ll let you know about all of the recent episodes so you can decide which ones you want to listen to. We also occasionally send out some bonus material. And if you’d like to give this show a five star review on iTunes. I would greatly appreciate it. It helps other people discover the show. You can email me at unleashed@umbrex.com Thanks for listening