It is important to use an email associated with your domain name, it is a part of your brand. Just as you’re not going to hand out generic sticky notes with your name written on it if you want to make an impression, you don’t want to use generic emails when you are building your business brand.

Using an email@yourdomain.com is a constant reminder to clients and prospective clients who you are, and where to find all the information about you.

How you choose to name your email, depends on the purpose of the email, and what impression you want to give.
Lets take an example of a business owner named Bob Jones, going from least personal to most personal:

• If Bob decides to use generic company emails like “admin” or “sales” this does not allow any concept of personal contact to the client. It is suitable when you have a group of people answering one email address, and the response to the email address, is more important than who will be reading or responding to it, such as “support@domain.com”. This kind of email does not depend on personal relationships.
• If Bob wants to build a corporate impression, and will have many staff members, we would suggest something like bjones@domain.com (gender neutral, people not sure who they are emailing)
• If Bob wants to have a more personal corporate impression, he could use bob.jones@domain.com. (full name gives people information about if it’s a woman or a man, and who it is)
• going with bobj@domain.com or bob@domain.com is great for a small business owner, if they want to show off the fact that they are all about personal service. This does also show that it’s a smaller company, as this naming convention does not allow multiple people with the same first name to have the same type of email.

So the rule is, yes, if you want to be taken seriously and build your brand, you need to have your email @ your company domain. However within that, you have levels of naming convention that provide different impressions of the connection between your clients and your staff… choose the one that best matches the email’s purpose, and your business identity.