Choosing the right email provider is paramount for a business and it is one of the most critical decisions as well because most of the online businesses are heavily dependent on Emails. Many email providers are in the market, which may confuse you. You have to compare features, consider user experience, and analyze their cost. Additionally, you can test them using their trial offers.
I will help you make that decision a bit easier. Below, I will review some of the steps in choosing an email provider, and a few of the features you’ll want to look out for.
Tips to Choose Professional Email For Your Business
Consider Core Features
The first thing you’ll need to consider is the core features. In 2023, that means not just the traditional email features, but also enhanced collaboration features necessary for ever more remote workforces and capabilities.
Today, when businesses regularly use chat apps like Slack and intuitive video meetings apps like Zoom, major email providers like Gmail and Microsoft have seen little advances in their interfaces or made attempts to integrate such functionalities. This is exactly the reason your business needs to use various tools such as Slack, Zoom, Gmail, or Microsoft to facilitate team communication.
If you’re one of many business owners frustrated by disjointed communications across multiple platforms and channels, look for an email client that provides all these features in one place. For example, Spike is one such free webmail, and one which allows you to integrate various email clients to create a truly omnichannel email, chat, voice, and video conversational experience integrated into one intuitive inbox.
Analyze Inbox Experience and Organization
Once you’ve found the email provider that best meets your functionality requirements, the next thing you’ll need to do is organization and productivity. There’s no point in setting up a feature-loaded webmail to just find out that it’s difficult to use and actually causes disorganization. In fact, this is one of the leading complaints against a range of business email providers. For example, Gmail’s “label” feature is an innovation on the tried and tested files and folders method used by email providers such as Microsoft Outlook.
However, instead of being able to easily organize your inbox by filtering emails out of the main inbox, “labels” let you tag emails as certain categories, but do not offer folders where those emails can be moved into. It’s also difficult to set up and segment emails to be delivered to a particular inbox. Thus, the end result is a cluttered inbox.
The lack of robust sorting and labeling capabilities is also a major con against webmails like ZohoMail. A frequent user complaint is that it lacks the ability to effectively organize the inbox, and that email tracking does not work reliably. While Titan business mail has been highly popular recently, organization and email inbox sorting are the major complaints against this email client as well. Users typically complain about the threat option, which leaves emails jumbled, emails not organized chronologically, and making specific emails incredibly difficult to sort through or find.
Review the Ecosystem and Integrations
When you’re considering a business email provider, you’re not looking only at the inbox itself, but also the various integration and the suite of features that come with it. For example, do you prefer to integrate with the classic Microsoft Office 365 suite of Word, XL, and Powerpoint – or the robust G-suite that spans Google Drive, Documents, Sheets, Slides, and the ever-useful Google Calendar? Or would your organization most benefit from integrating and leveraging the behemoth benefits of both Microsoft and Google through an integrated experience like with Spike? Whichever options you decide works best for your business, it’s critical to consider devices as well. For example, some Microsoft Office 365 suites like Publisher and Access are only for PC – are useless to splurge on if the majority of your employees have MacBooks. Conversely, there’s no point signing up for an iCloud account if most of your employees work from PCs.
Conduct a Cost-Benefit Analysis
Lastly, when selecting an email provider for your business is to conduct a cost-benefit analysis. We don’t mean just the cost, but the utility you will receive for the expense. For example, consider the Microsoft Basic plan. It costs $6 (mind you, that’s per user per month – which can add up pretty quickly). However, it offers a debatable amount in terms of value. The plan does not include access to the desktop versions of Office apps like Word or XL for PC or Mac. Which is actually something of a necessity in a business environment. None of the lower-tier (or moderately affordable) versions of Microsoft offer advanced security protection, such as detecting threats in email attachments and links, or defenses against zero-day threats, ransomware, and other advanced malware. You don’t get that until the Business Premium plan which costs $22 a month – per user. For a company with even 10 employees, that’s a hefty $220 per month.
Thus, it is important to analyze the cost and the benefits. And, most importantly how much your business can afford. Based on this analysis, you should go ahead and select an email provider for your business.
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