It is quite frequent that business owners will use a free email provider for their business, and create an email account like “mybusinessname@yahoo.com” for customers to use to contact them. It’s understandable why business owners do this.
- Well, it’s free. When starting a business you may need to run as lean as possible and pay only for the essentials.
- It’s easy. Free email accounts can be setup within minutes. Knowing where to even get started with setting up email with your own domain can seem daunting, especially if you are not tech savvy.
How Using A Free Email Account Can Cost You
While a free email service is free of out of pocket costs you might want to consider how it might cost your trustworthiness as a business. Customers are looking for your products and services. If they find that your business email address is through a free email service the impression is set that you might be an individual that hasn’t setup a legit business, or maybe just new business without experience. Something as simple as your email address can make potential customers think twice about choosing your business or your competitor.
How To Get Email With Your Own Domain
If you already have a website with your own domain you can likely add email service with that same domain with your host provider (for example: godaddy.com, hostgator.com, etc). Sometimes they will include email accounts with your hosting plan, so it is just a matter of setting it up. While this will take care of giving your business a trustworthy email address they may not be as easy for you to use or they won’t include other useful features.
At SpinnerMedia we recommend using Google Workspace. We even use it for our own business. There are many reasons that we like Google Workspace, but in this article we are focusing just on the Gmail part of Google Workspace. You may have just read “Gmail” and thought, “wait a minute…isn’t Gmail one of those free email services?” The answer is “Yes”, and “No”. Anyone can setup a free Gmail account which will give you a an email address like “bob@gmail.com”. This is not what we are recommending for your business.
Why G Suite?
G Suite provides Gmail and its related services for use by businesses with their own domain, so you can use Gmail to create an email address like “bob@mybusinessname.com”.
Gmail is secure and it is easily accessible from any computer or on your mobile device using the Gmail app, so you will be able to impress your customers with your fast response. Gmail is integrated with Google Calendar (also included in Google Workspace) which makes it easy to schedule and manage meetings with your customers.
Google Workspace also includes the ability to create Groups. Each group has its own email address which can distribute incoming messages to any of your Gmail addresses that you include in the group. This allows you to create public facing email addresses like “info@mybusinessname.com” or “support@mybusinessname.com” without having to may for additional licenses.
Gmail also has all of the standard features that you might expect to see in business email tools like Microsoft Outlook such as the ability to create a professional signature line to include in each email, custom filtering rules, out of office notifications, email forwarding and more.
Finally, you might we wondering how much this costs. Google Workspace (which includes a lot more than just Gmail and the few other features we mentioned here) is currently only $6 per user per month for the Basic plan which includes 30GB of storage. This allows you to scale as needed. If you are a one-person business you would just need to pay the $6 per month for your one email address and up to 30GB of storage. Just hired your first employee who needs an email address? Now you’re just paying $12 per month for both of your email address and 60GB of storage (each user has they own 30GB storage limit).
Google Workspace is a fantastic tool for your business. It’s secure, low cost and easily accessible all while making your business look and communicate like a trustworthy, professional business.
We will be writing more articles about the other benefits of Google Workspace for your business, so stay tuned.
