Find an email tool that best fits your business

Saturday, 30 August 2008 13:05 by Admin

Email tools are abundant and nowadays everybody seems to be retrofitted with a gigantic mailbox that will probably never be filled up for a very long time. Expensive tools are not always the best tool for your business, even though it comes equipped with functions that in my opinion, you will probably never use. Let me use the scenario in which one person started the business and grows and eventually get married and then grow older and then have every family remember joining the team. As in each scenario, the email structure that started from a one-man band could be different from mom and pap, and a family-owned business.

In a one person team scenario, one guy wears the hat that says "I am the sales+marketing+operation+whatever". Even though a email structure can be set up to reflect each of the role that this single person is playing, but it's probably too complicated for that person to handle info@, sales@, marketing@, service@.....and he just say:” I’ll just use my private email: john.doe@yahoo.com". Fine, this is probably the best case for this scenario because at this stage of the game, Your business takes the form of that one-person's identity and building business upon that personal identity is a smart way to attract more customers.

Using a personal email to conduct business usually means several things:
1. I am in stealthy mode now and not ready to reveal my business identity yet.
2. I am a super neat person, business is business, personal is personal.
3. I want to add a personal touch to the communication.
4. My business just started and I haven’t had time to get the email personalized.

Regardless of what you want others to interpret, if you find using a private email address convenient, stick to it. Because you don't even know what's going to happen to your business, so spend less time worrying about the email structure and more time on the market! Hopefully your business grows and survives a couple of downturns and if you lucky enough, you will find your spouse and teamed up in the very business you started. Now "1+1=2"? right, Well at least not in the number of email boxes.

Now you have two-person team, and it may well equally divide the responsibility as marketing, sales, service and so on. The business has grown into maturity and you want to add some professional touch to your email system and now you ended up with many email boxes. Not only do you need to communicate from one but sometimes two boxes and on top of that, communicating each others on a variety of issues such as service, leads projects etc. Until now, this one-to-one relationship as it's in one-person stage just get multiplied not only by the amount of mail boxes but also in the amount of information transferred. Well, now you have your relatives want to join your business because they all see the different mailboxes you two have and think they are big now. "1+1+n="? You get the picture.

So how do you know your current email needs? Well, you don't know it. But your customers know. Adding email structure is all about dissecting the information to target customer and market. If you think creating different mailboxes will help you add values to customer service, better communication, then do it. If you have a genius way of managing the amount of emails in that one super box and still can keep up, stick to it. You see right here, the essence of creating email structure is not just to receive email and find a place to store them. Creating email structure has to, in the meantime, create value for your business in term of better customer service, campaign marketing or sales. If it were not for the reasons of adding values, the email structure is an overhead to maintain, upgrade and sustain.

To build a private label (own domain) email system requires knowledge of Domain name server, mail exchange and also knowledge on IMAP or POP3. And on top of this, controlling the spam would also be needed to keep the bad worms out your sensitive data. This is no easy task for small business let alone for entepreneurs completely out of the IT arena.

Before diving into the pool, you need to define your email needs for now, at least for now:
1. Ask yourself how important is the private label email to your customer. For a PR business that polish relations for others, you definitely will need that look and feel.
2. Assess how do you want to control spam. If you do post regularly at forum or SNS, you could well be worried about the amount of spam you will receive from that email box. Tips: get a dedicated email address for sign up and another email for conducting business
3. Do you need to send campaign emails out? if you do send out email in large volumn, it's wise to get a paid email marketing system like iContact, constant contact. Because you don't want to have your email address listed as spammer. Besides, there are new rules regarding how to send out mass email.
4. Web or desktop. Web email is very convenient but many desktop application that will still need email client to operate, i.e. endicia. In most cases, business will need both.
5. Define the flow requirements for customer service, sales, marketing and shipping. Usually you will just need this group inbox for small business. Ask how can the email information be routed or assigned among the best flow that benefits the customer and the teams. You may want to forward some inboxes to other to simply the flow.
6. Understand email system needs to grow with your business. One example we had after implementing our very own CRM system, we changed from Outlook to Thunderbird so we can better use the many open source plugins that lacks in Outlook