Overview
In today's digital era, an email address is more than a digital mailbox. It can also serve as an expression of our personal identity. However, with the proliferation of email users, securing a desired email address, let alone a professional one, has become increasingly challenging.
Many individuals seek email addresses that reflect professionalism, often opting for addresses that directly incorporate their first and last names. This is particularly useful for networking, or for individuals that merely want to express a more professional identity.
But does such formality indeed convey a sense of professionalism that sets one’s email address apart from other less formal options? As the number of available email addresses diminishes, it’s becoming an increasingly important question—one we sought to answer with a clever email experiment.
The Experiment
For our study, we recruited 400 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to take part in a survey that contained, among other activities and questions, a vignette scenario involving an email and email address. Each participant was presented with an email from a hypothetical acquaintance, with the email address randomly assigned as either the person's full name or an abbreviated version containing a mix of related characters and numbers.
Participants were asked to “Imagine you get an email from [[email protected] / [email protected]], a recent acquaintance asking if there are any job openings at the company you work for.” The presentation of either the full name or mixed email address was randomized for each participant.
Participants were then requested to rate the perceived professionalism of the email sender on a 1-7 scale using the following survey question, “How professional do you feel this email sender is? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely).” We then compared the average of these professionalism ratings between the full-name email address and the mixed-characters email address.
Results
Our findings indicated that there was, in fact, a significant difference in perceived professionalism between the email address with mixed characters (avg. = 4.25) and the email address with the person’s full name (avg. = 4.98). This difference of 0.73 translates to a 17% increase in perceived professionalism for having an email address with one’s full name (p < 0.001). Neither age nor gender significantly influenced these results.
Conclusion
If you have the opportunity (and your email provider has the availability), an email address with some variation of your full name appears to bestow a "professionalism premium" comparted to a combination of your initials with other numbers or characters. So, if you’re the type of person who uses a personal email address for networking or keeping in touch with colleagues outside of your industry or workplace, try acquiring an email address with your name.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in professionalism perceptions between our full name and mixed email address conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. For statistically significant results, the difference between the averages of the two groups would be large, and the corresponding “p-value” would be small (p < 0.05). This indicates that if we were to replicate the study with the same population, we would likely obtain a similar effect. Additionally, we utilized OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to explore potential significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics.
Data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.