Offering Free Email Addresses – The Why and How Posted August 2nd, 2006 in Monetization, Promotion / Contests, Guest Contributors

Long ago, a few small, but growing sites figured out the benefits of offering free email addresses to their users. Perhaps you have heard of them? Yahoo!? Hotmail? Yeah, I figured you had heard of them, and while offering free email addresses may not have been the only reason for their success, it certainly didn’t hurt.

In a crowded marketplace, fledgling sites (especially forums) have to make themselves stand out to be noticed. These sites have to do something better than their competitors in order to gain ground. One such thing is offering free email addresses to members. It worked for Yahoo!, and it can work for you too.

First, the benefits. Why should you offer free email addresses to your members?

- It keeps members coming back. It’s really cool having yourname@yourfavoritesite.com, so members will want to use it. If they need to log in on your site to view their mail, that will keep them coming back. Once they are there to check mail, they might as well starting reading. Once they start reading… Well, you get the idea.
- It promotes your site. Each member that uses your domain email address puts your web address in front of more users – enhancing your brand. I don’t know about you, but if I see an interesting domain name when someone emails me, I check it out. A bit of free promotion never hurts!
- It’s a nice thing to do. It’s always good to find ways to be nice to your members. (Nice wins, trust me.)
- It’s not that hard to set up, so why not do it?.

So now that you are convinced, you need to decide how to go about it. There are a number of options, but there is no one size fits all solution. I will just give you some options, and you need to decide which is right for your forum.

Google Hosted Mail Beta – Google recently began a beta program for offering free hosted Gmail accounts. We have tested this service and it has been great. We have two beta accounts, though we aren’t using it to provide mail to our members at this point. (We are still in the planning phase of our upgraded memberships - a great way monetize your forum.) The downside to this is that they won’t be logging in to your site to get their mail, but the upside is that Gmail rocks, so users may be more likely to use it. You can always apply for the beta, and if you are accepted, you simply need to change your MX records and you are in!

Sponsored Mail from Everyone.net – This service was suggested to me a couple of different times by members at Lee’s Big Board Admin and a couple of other sites. I have not yet used this service, but the feedback I got was good overall I read their sales page and FAQ, and it looks like you need to have a “large” and mostly US-based member base. I am not sure what they mean by ‘large,’ but that might limit this for some sites. The downside is that there are ads, so if that is a concern, this isn’t the solution for you. I would love to hear feedback if anyone has used this service.

vBulletin Mail System (vBMS) – This one looks really cool to me because it totally integrates with vBulletin. While not everyone runs vBulletin, it is clearly the software of choice for big board admins, so many of Forum Trends’ readers are probably using it. You can check out all of the features on the site, and there is a forum for pre-sales questions. I have not used this product myself, but from browsing the site, it looks like a lot of people ditched the once popular, but now seemingly unsupported Hivemail product for this one. The main difference, as I understand it, is that vBMS runs from within vBulletin – it isn’t something that is added on. I would certainly give this one a second look. The integrated log in would be fantastic for encouraging those frequent returns to your site!

A few other possible options:
- @Mail
- Roundcube
- SocketMail
- Merak Mail Server

I would also like to point out that these email addresses don’t have to be free. As I mentioned earlier, a great way to monetize a forum is through paid memberships. These paying members would get upgraded features, like an email account. I would not advise a brand new forum to monetize in this way, but an established userbase is likely to welcome the chance to support their favorite site. Check out Lee’s Premium Membership page at Sprint Users for an example of this monetization method.

While none of us are likely aspiring to be the next free email provider to take over the net, offering free email addresses @yourdomain.com is a great way to build loyalty among members, promote branding, encourage return trips to your site, and above all, it’s totally doable with a bit of research and know how.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com