With on-line marketing strategies, e-mail is one of our top methods for tracking leads and conversions in addition to phone call tracking. In most cases, we hide the e-mail addresses behind forms in order to track the lead on the conversion page such as “thank-you.php”. However, just because it is hidden doesn’t mean we don’t need the presence of professional e-mail and functionality with collaboration.
Let’s rewind a bit. In prior years the best solution for our customers has been a custom email address using POP3 with your business, example mike@mybusiness.com. However the spam was a nightmare without an expensive spam filtering service and was constant hangups with syncing multiple devices. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
Once GMAIL become available, we started switching all our clients over to mainly combat the ongoing spam of being a popular and established business. However, we had to use an email address such as mybusiness@gmail.com. While far more professional feel than say AOL, Yahoo or Hotmail, we were not fully satisfied with doing this for our larger clients and small clients want to appear larger, right?
Soon came, Google Apps For Business. Now before we dive into the awesome features of Google Apps, let’s talk a bit about the old school cubicle days of working Microsoft Exchange, the oldest and largest mail solution.
Let me first start by saying, I loathe Microsoft products. I’ve been known to buy my family and friend MAC’s out of pure pity from seeing them use a PC. But I will try to be as unbiased as possible.
So why the “dislike” for Microsoft?
Once upon a time, I had a day job at a big accounting firm and was on a Microsoft Exchange server where all our emails and calendars synced in perfect harmony. Not quite! While I am sure things have changed significantly, I can remember email servers crashing constantly, losing our calendars and more bugs almost on a weekly basis. Not to mention the nightmare that is Microsoft Outlook.
But there are some good things and bigger corporations that are set in their ways are operating just fine and collaborate internally very well.
But here we are in 2016. We have MACS. We use GMAIL. We love GOOGLE. We love our iPhones and Droid devices.
So the company with the largest market cap has come out with a solution that is simple and works. It syncs flawlessly with all your devices and doesn’t require an expensive service or a tech guy that can debug your issue on a daily basis. Working with your team is extremely easy. Sharing files, calendars, and organizing projects is now possible and it is all for $5/month!
No longer do I have to get on the phones with clients and walk them though setting up a POP3, IMAP, or any weird acronym. Only to have them call me when they travel and say their incoming mail server isn’t work, or the outbox has 10 unsent messages in it. Sound familiar?
Today in 2016, our clients now have custom email addresses such as name@mycompanyname.com and have all the great features of GMAIL with plenty of storage at all times.
Now they have a professional email in a world where reputation is everything for SMB and get all the features of an exchange service like Microsoft without the headache.
And guess what it takes seconds to setup. With the email address and password it sets up just like a GMAIL account and most devices have an option for this.
The only thing we do as an agency is advise our clients on this solution and set up the MX entries for them and it is smooth sailing for them as long as they continue to pay the $5/month.
Did I mention, you get a ton of aliases too. So if you want accounts such as sales, info, etc. you can forward them to your main email without an extra fee.
Google apps is just a great solution for our SMB’s and we are not looking back or even considering MS exchange. Even though they are advertising $4/month now. Really? You have to be pretty tight to use another service to save $12 per year.
While this article is for our small and medium business companies, there are tons of Fortune 500 companies now using Google Apps.
If you have any questions or comments please use the comment section below.
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