How to make your email address easy to say in radio ads and spoken referrals

Say it out loud before you print it

That sounds obvious until the business name has 3 words, the domain has a hyphen, the spelling is unusual, and the caller is half-listening in a ute, workshop or kitchen. The address may look fine on a website. It can still fall apart when a customer has to hear it, remember it, and type it later.

For Australian small businesses and tradies, this matters anywhere the email is spoken or quickly copied: local radio, sponsorship reads, flyers, site signs, van signage, fridge magnets, quotes and word-of-mouth referrals.

Before putting an email address in an ad, read it out loud as if a customer has never seen your business name. Try: ‘Email quotes at bright side plumbing services dot com dot au.’ Now imagine saying it at the end of a 15-second radio spot, or a customer repeating it to their partner and typing it into a phone later.

The address might be technically correct, but still too clumsy for spoken use. A better radio ad email address is short, plain and hard to mishear.

Avoid characters people cannot hear

Some things are easy on a screen and poor in speech. Hyphens are the obvious one. If the address includes a dash, you have to explain whether it is a hyphen, minus sign or dash. Underscores are worse. Numbers can also create friction because people may not know whether to type 4 or four.

The same applies to long initials, doubled letters and unusual spelling. If your business name already needs spelling over the phone, adding a long domain after the @ symbol makes the customer do more work.

A good spoken address should not need a mini instruction manual.

Pick the right word before the @ symbol

The part before the @ symbol should match what the customer wants to do. For a radio ad or flyer, quotes@ is often clearer than a personal name if the main action is ‘ask for a quote’. bookings@ can suit service appointments. hello@ can work when the business wants one friendly front door. accounts@ usually belongs on invoices, not in a radio ad asking for new enquiries.

Keep it boring if boring is clearer. The customer is not judging the cleverness of the address. They are trying to contact the business.

Keep the domain short enough to remember

The domain after the @ symbol is where many small businesses lose people. A long business name may be fine on the side of a van because the customer can look at it. In audio, the customer only gets one pass. If the radio read ends with a long .com.au address, the strongest part of the ad can become the hardest part to act on.

Shorter is not automatically better. The address still needs to make sense for the business, feel credible, and pass availability and setup checks. But a short .au address can be easier to say, print, repeat and remember than a longer public email address.

Match the address to the channel

A radio ad, a flyer and a referral do not behave the same way. On radio, the listener cannot look back. The email should be short enough to understand on first hearing, or the ad should point to a phone number or website instead.

On a flyer, the reader can scan again, but the address still needs to be large enough and simple enough to type from paper.

In a spoken referral, the address has to survive being passed from one person to another. If a customer says, ‘Email them at quotes at something something dot com dot au,’ the lead may never arrive.

Use a quick spoken-address checklist

Before approving a radio script, flyer or sign, check the email address against these questions:

• Can someone understand it without seeing it written down?
• Does it avoid hyphens, underscores and confusing numbers?
• Is the role word before the @ symbol clear?
• Is the domain short enough to repeat after 1 listen?
• Would a customer know how to spell it?
• Has the business tested the address from outside its own inbox?
• Is someone responsible for checking the inbox it forwards to?

Where Short Mail fits

Short Mail helps Australian businesses check whether a shorter, easier-to-say .au email address can forward to the inbox they already use.

That can be useful when the current public email is too long for radio, cards, flyers, site signs or referrals, but the business does not want to change the inbox it already checks.

The right setup still depends on fit, availability, eligibility, forwarding destination and manual setup checks. Short Mail does not replace every email system or promise that a shorter address will create more enquiries. It gives the business a cleaner public email option to review before the next ad, reprint or campaign.