Most Personal Trainers start off using a generic email address such as tomspersonaltraining@gmail.com.

While this works fine, it doesn’t look particularly professional. It’s worth putting in the small effort required to get a proper email address.

Fortunately if you already have a website you’ve already got a domain, which means you’ve got everything you need to create something like: yourname@yourdomain.com

(Don’t have a website? We can help.)

As your business grows you can add other staff members to your email account, all with @yourdomain.com as their address.

There’s a few ways to get a professional email up and running, but we only ever recommend one platform: Google Apps.

Why Google Apps?

Google Apps is a fantastic service that allows you to run your company email off of Google’s mail servers.

In addition, you also get access to the entire Google productivity suite, which includes Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Drive.

We won’t go into loads of detail about those other products here, but suffice to say they are all very useful as they let you create and store all your important documents such as invoices, client questionnaires, appointments etc. all in one place that you can access anywhere with an internet connection, including your phone while you’re on the move.

Back to them email service, here are some of the top benefits of using Google:

Professional Company Email: Many small business people use their @hotmail, @gmail or @ISP address for their work email. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this. But, using your @YourCompanyDomain.com email address looks more professional. And the odd person may look up your site and visit just by seeing your email address (bonus traffic to your site!).

Storage Space: The best mail servers provide around 1GB of storage space for emails. Most provide less unless you want to pay for space. Google provides 10GB, which should be more than enough for most small business.

Search: If you do end up using a lot of space for your email then you don’t have to worry about trying to find an email from two years ago. Google’s search function is the best there is. So, you’ll always be able to find that old email so long as you haven’t deleted it.

Spam: We all get a bit each week. However, if you want to reduce your spam, just setup your company email to go through Google Apps. They have some of the best spam filters around which will save you the trouble of having to delete those pesky unwanted messages manually.

Mobile: Google is a huge player in the mobile market. They have a solution for almost all mobile devices so that you can get your email while you are on the go.

Easy Access: In addition to mobile, you can be assured that you will be able to check your email from anywhere that has an internet connection.

Easy Setup: Google provide step-by-step instructions and videos. You don’t need to have any technical knowledge to setup Google Apps. You just need to have the attention span to watch a few minute video and you’re good to go.

How Much Does It Cost?

Google Apps is normally $5 per user (a user is an individual email address) per month, or $50/year.