Your Business Email Should Not Be a Gmail Address
If your invoices arrive from a free consumer account, you are quietly telling every customer you are smaller than you are. Fixing it takes an afternoon.
Walk through any business district in Accra and ask for a card. A good number of them will carry an email address ending in gmail.com or yahoo.com, printed next to a company name and a landline.
There is nothing wrong with Gmail as a service. The problem is the address. When a customer receives a quote from a free consumer account, some part of their brain files it next to the spam they get from strangers.
An address at your own domain does three things. It looks like a company. It proves you own the domain, which is itself a signal that you are established. And it survives staff changes, because the address belongs to the business rather than to one person.
The security argument matters more. When a member of staff leaves with a personal account that has been used for company business, they leave with the correspondence, the client relationships, and often the password reset route into your other accounts. With a company domain you disable one account and it is over.
There is also a deliverability problem almost nobody knows about. Sending business mail through a free consumer account makes it far more likely to land in spam, because the receiving server cannot verify you are authorised to send on behalf of your business.
Setting it up properly means buying the domain, pointing a few DNS records at your mail provider, and configuring SPF, DKIM and DMARC so receiving servers trust you. It costs very little a year and takes an afternoon once.
If you already have a website, you already own a domain, which means you can do this today. Most businesses simply never got around to it.
Your website is where people decide whether to trust you. Your email address is where they decide whether to reply.