Learning to love the email server you use for your small business can be a problem, especially if it doesn’t have a lot of features to help you organize. If you are like me and own a small business, you probably already have a website and an associated email system that comes with your web server. However, while it’s great to have your email end with yoursite.com, many of the email servers from your web hosting company don’t offer the same features or level of quality gmail does. There are literally hundreds of good free web-based email servers out there, including Yahoo, Hotmail, and others, but there is nothing at all like Gmail. There are a number of reasons why Gmail is the best email for a small business and the following are the most important.
One of the best features for a small business using Gmail as an email server is that you no longer have to track through all of your emails to find a particular email from a customer. This is a great email feature for a small business because it saves a lot of time. Since gmail saves all of your messages in conversations, it is simple to find out why the client is emailing you again or about your past relationship with them. For a small business, this feature of Gmail is great because once you find all of the conversations (which are messages and replies under the same topic or message header) with a particular client, you can see how things went and what their past orders or issues were without having to keep arduous records of these things. Gmail is great for a small business because it keeps all the essential communications with your clients or customers intact and easy to access. The customer relationship management of Gmail is what makes it the best email server option for small businesses. You get 24*7 assistance with an easy management of your emails.
While many other free email servers are upgrading their email service, none offer the easy searching capability that Gmail. Hotmail recently added a search function, for example, but I found that it was not as consistent as Gmail’s and was less likely to find strings of words, although it did a good job with one-word queries. This search capability makes Gmail excellent for small business because it allows you to simply type in the customer’s name and bring up a series of all of their past communication with you, or the name of a product, phone number (and who it belongs to if it’s in the same message) or even a person’s email. Before Gmail, your small business was reliant on long difficult records kept for the extraneous details about every order. With Gmail, a small business is free to operate without worrying about spending a lot time recording things since they are so easy to find.
Another great aspect about Gmail for small businesses is that there is a huge storage limit. You can literally, even if you receive a lot of attachments on a daily basis, keep every single email you receive. There are options to keep them in the inbox of dump them folders and with the search and conversations features, there is no worry about putting them in a folder and not being able to quickly find them later. This large storage limit allows you to have email forwarded from a few of your business accounts if you want, and thus allows you to tag them differently to keep them separated. Additionally, Gmail is great for small businesses because it has a wonderful address book that is easy to edit, it automatically types in the name of contacts as you begin the first few letters, it has gmail chat so you can add clients and talk remotely, and it utilizes Gmail’s calendar feature, which is wonderful for small business and personal use.
Every aspect of Gmail is perfect for small business owners. It is very easy to use, although for a while, it might take some getting used to the fact that you don’t get messages individually, instead they are in the conversation and at first, it can be easy to miss an email unless you see that the messages are bolded. Also, there is a great forwarding feature as well as the possibility to use a “reply to” address so you can maintain having an email address that bears the name of your small business.
