Let’s Chat About Email
Basic, But Important
Email is crucial in day-to-day operations, what are the benefits of a Professional Address?
If you’re a business in this day and age you likely have am Email account. It’s the best and most powerful way to communicate with vendors and customers. It’s the crucial tether for your business for every single portion of your operations.
But, and be honest here, how much mind do you give it?
Many businesses will set up a free email with one of the largest providers as their primary email. Many intermingle their already used personal emails to conduct their daily communication.
Both are pretty bad ideas.
To fully explain why using a personal free email account for business is a less than ideal way let’s review the case of a client we recently helped: Business owner and manager of a physical location that requires intensive and exact scheduling. After losing access to one of their personal accounts they attempted to migrate to another personal but different free email service.
Most people’s free email accounts have a lot of stuff in the inbox. Bought something off a website 8 years ago? You’re getting advertising emails. Had to enter your email to get the recipe you really wanted? Getting constant updates from that site’s newsletter. Gave your email to a long lost cousin to “keep in touch?” OK so that isn’t likely advertising but more likely slightly unhinged chain letters that they mistakenly thought you’d be interested in. According to a blog post by Venngage estimated that the average person gets 121 emails a day. That’s a lot of noise to compete with the notice from a vendor that they are out of stock of what you ordered. Separating these parts of your life is the only way to manage all the mail, as well as the emails that most need your attention get your attention.
Like just about everyone the client we were working for had thousands of unread emails in their inbox. But it doesn’t end there:
1) Online Reputation Issues
Many businesses that utilize free email for their primary communication may not know there’s a hidden danger: automatic reputation filtering. Because the barrier of entry for a free email is so low that bots can sign-up in mere seconds many of the Spam filters of the major providers falsely mark legitimate communication as illegitimate actions. It’s impossible to gauge the risk of being swept erroneously as Spam or inauthentic but it’s a lot more than zero. Business Domains with good online reputation (up-to-date website and no marks for Spam activity) are much less likely to face such scrutiny of the automatic spam filters. For us, that’s a huge risk for an invoice not to be sent appropriately.
2) Professionalism
According to recent studies 75% of consumers find Business Domain emails as much more trustworthy than their free counterparts. We know that image and competency don’t always have a 1:1 relationship but its’ the most assured way to initiate trust in your business.
Let’s Chat About Email – Cont’d
3) Safety and Security
Free email accounts get hacked and lost pretty often. Once a business loses their access to their primary free email account customer service is generally lacking. Even as a small firm we’ve had at least five clients that have lost access to their free email accounts that took hours and hundreds of dollars in labor costs for us to recover from their provider (so much for “free, eh?). Think about how often you refer back to existing threads and communications, once that’s gone its’ very hard to get back
4) Scaling Issues
After years of toiling, building your business, keeping clients happy… now is the time to hire some help dealing with the day-to-day tasks. Awesome, congratulations! Wait though, what email will this employee use? They could get their own free account, but you have no control over it after initial set up and becomes hard for the recipients to parse what is coming from who. You could give access to the primary free email account but its’ just another failure point for catastrophic data loss and rogue former employees to create headaches. What if you need to hire two more employees things are going so well? It just spirals into madness quickly, and potentially costing you BIG in the long run if anything goes wrong.
What we did for the client we mentioned before was to create a new email account that was attached to their companies existing website domain, transferred most of the existing business related emails to the new service, sent out a introduction email to existing vendors and major customers, and pointed all form submissions to this the new box. The client was ecstatic to finally have a sense of control over the workflow and professionalism the new address gave him.
So should you have a free email account? Yes, and in future posts we’ll explain why. Should you use it as your primary method of professional communication? We hope we’ve demonstrated that the answer is an emphatic “NO!.”
Which provider should you use? We’ll cover some of that issue in an upcoming post.
Please contact use if you think you could use a workflow consulting package and we will try to find what your needs are and the best tools to meet your goals!
