Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's the best "Contact Us" email address for a startup?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the best "Contact Us" email address for a startup?

#33

Post by vinothgopi »

agwa wrote: post #18
codegeek wrote: post #6

I would divide it up by business functions. "Contact", "team" etc are very generic. For example, both an exisiting customer and a prospective customer could tehcnically be "contacting" you. But you want to differentiate there. I would go for something like: Sales: sales@xyz.com Customer Support: customersupport@xyz.com Press release/inquiry: press@xyz.com Partners/vendors etc: partner@xyz.com Anything else: hello@xyz…

I think such a scheme is customer-unfriendly, especially for a small company where there isn't a compelling organizational need to have separate email addresses. For example, if an existing customer wants to both place a new order and get customer support, should they be expected to send two emails, one to sales and another to support? Also, I've noticed that once a customer gets a company's email address in their ad…

Well it is a little unfriendly (many emails to remember?) but I think it does help. While in a small company we tend to have overlapping roles, slowly our roles become more concrete. When that happens, a mail to say payments@ will immediately tell the payments guy that he has to do something although many others may be cc-ed. Or it may tell the customer that sending a mail to the specific topic email address might get a faster response.

Secondly, like how we all know that company.com/about usually takes us to the team page, the press might try to hit up press@. There is always a fallback - the contactus@ but when the number of emails start exploding, it helps when tagging emails by purpose.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best "Contact Us" email address for a startup?

#34

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

general inquiries usually go to info@. if you are that concerned, use actionable verbs.

we're past the point where setting up email us trivial, so endlessly splitting up your email addresses is more self serving than customer centric.

PS: contact forms are way more important.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best "Contact Us" email address for a startup?

#37

Post by jtheory »

MichaelTieso wrote: post #11

Keep it as simple as possible. One email address for everything and expand as time goes on. I usually do contact@.

The problem with this is that as you expand, most of your customers will not expand with you.

So they may start using contact@ to communicate directly with the founding team; two years later they will use contact@ and get the intern who is supposed to redirect email (and may not do a great job of it).

If you start out with the 4 or 5 standard options (at least splitting tech support from sales), they may initially all be mailing lists that go to all founders -- then you can direct them appropriately later as you specialize... and your clients/customers won't need to change anything.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best "Contact Us" email address for a startup?

#38

Post by simantel »

tansey wrote: post #12

If you really just want one email for everything, go with team@mydomain.com. All the other choices imply a purpose for the email (e.g., first contact or help with a problem).

Yeah, I agree about using just one email. I like Medium's approach of using yourfriends@medium.com.
Post reply on HN