Emails remain to be the key driver of customer acquisition and retention for small to mid-sized businesses. Although social media is booming with its likes, comments, tweets, and shares, it still does not outshine the importance of emails.
According to statistics, 81% of small and midsize businesses still depend on emails as their main channel for acquiring customers. The findings demonstrate that sending emails is continues to be the best way for direct reach and impact.
As businesses need to send and receive thousands of emails each day, managing them is not that easy task. Additionally, your business emails contain your company’s domain name, which, in turn, helps in establishing your credibility. Hence, it makes sense for businesses to offload email hosting to experts.
So, when a client receives your email with the company name on it, they can search for your company to get more details about your products or services that may catch their attention.
Why should you go for business email hosting instead of freebies like Gmail?
Businesses using free services might seem unprofessional. Hence, it may lead to people judging the legitimacy of your company. Some people have a misconception that you are not serious about your business, while some others may think that your business won’t be around in the long run. There is a fair chance of your business becoming vulnerable to cybercriminals.
And that’s the last thing you may want for your business!
Thus, instead of going for free emails for your business like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and more, it is a good idea to pay and choose a reliable hosting service. Investing a few dollars in business email hosting might save your business from such negative perceptions and help you establish your business as legitimate and trustworthy. It is a win-win situation for your business as well as your customers by protecting their interests.
Let’s find out some of the benefits of using business email.
Builds Trust
If you want your customers to take your business seriously, having an anonymous identity won’t work. Getting an email account for free is no brainer these days, and if you are a business wanting to establish trust, you need to stand out in the crowd.
With a business email, your customers can recognize your business as trustworthy, which is the first step to leading a successful business. Even though you have a small team, you can give a diversified look at your organization with different email ids for billing, sales, jobs, and support.
Casts a Professional Impression
Someone has said it right –
The first impression is the last impression.
It indeed holds true when it comes to business. Most of the time, you interact with your client through emails. The moment your prospect or customer opens the email, you need to make that connection to drive your business ahead.
Having a business email creates a professional image of your brand in the eyes of your targeted customers that can help you get a competitive advantage from the rest.
Protects Sensitive Business Data
Free email hosting services face frequent malware attacks and are prone to spamming and targeted advertisements. They lack the essential security measures needed to protect the interests of users. Additionally, you do not have full control of your emails as well.
If you run a business, you need to secure your business as well as the interests of your customers along with their data. Hence, you must not risk your business by using free email services that can make your business vulnerable.
Saves Your Emails from Going into Spam Filters
Malware and spammers can easily target free emails. If you utilize email marketing efforts to drive your sales, using free emails might take a toll on your revenue. It is because your sent emails might be shown as spam. So, if your customers do not check their spam folders, all your efforts would go in vain.
But if you take email hosting from experts, it saves your emails from getting bounced or going into spam folders. Thus, you can enjoy interacting with your customers through emails and continue leveraging benefits.
Backup and Privacy
Free emails tend to incur high risks of crashing down, close without prior warning, or even hacked. When this happens without any backups, it might cost your business in terms of essential business information that cannot be retrieved. You lose confidential information and important emails from your customers and prospects.
Branding
Professional email creates a strong brand identity of your business by advertising the name of your company. It makes your brand reliable in the eyes of the customers by just looking at the name.
Now that you have a fair idea about how important business emails are for your business, listed below are some of the reliable email hosting services at your disposal.
G Suite
Create a professional email address for your business using G Suite, which is the Gmail you already adore. It offers admin controls and a bunch of interesting features without any annoying ads. The email hosting is endowed with tools designed to boost your business productivity by letting you work faster and smarter!
G Suit has not only made email communication effortless but also innovative, where you can collaborate in real-time on your files and access calendar to schedule meetings. Built on the highly secure infrastructure of Google, G Suite protects all your business data, users, and devices. It also backs up your data in the cloud, and you get full control of your email.
The features it offers are Gmail, Calendar, currents, chat, Meet, Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Sites, Apps Scripts, Drive, Cloud Search, Keep, Admin, vault, Endpoint, G Suite training, and add-ons.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is packed with useful email tools and features to help you with your email marketing. You can use IMAP or POP3 to send or receive emails. And if you want to use webmail, RoundCube and Horde are pre-installed at your disposal. In addition, it includes Mailman to help you contact from an opt-in email list.
The email hosting service offers you greater uptime commitment for leveraging a reliable performance. Each email hosting account is loaded with a bunch of email resources for free. You can find and manage these resources from its control panel called cPanel.
These free resources include the following.
- Email hosting accounts to manage your accounts and passwords and configure POP3 or IMAP settings.
- Webmail through Roundcube and Horde
- BoxTrapper to verify the sender
- SpamAssassin to filter spams
- Barracuda for enhanced spam filtration by checking each incoming email
- Email authentication and forwarding
- MX Entry to send emails
- Auto Responders, mailing list, Encryption, and many more
Zoho Mail
Want to enjoy an encrypted, secure, and add-free hosting?
Zoho can cover them all along with guaranteed privacy. With this email hosting, you can achieve agile and enhanced protection against malware and spam. It provides professional email ids to give your brand higher visibility and authenticity.
The data centers of Zoho Mail have high-grade surveillance and security to provide you with reliable uptime. Both end-to-end and at-rest encryption is done to secure your emails along with message encryption through S/MIME.
Using Zoho’s powerful and straightforward control panel, you can execute all the settings, customization, and configuration. You can smoothly add users, set up your policies, manage group names, and many more. Retain your emails for a certain period in order to counter any legal attacks. It also offers e-Discovery to help you discover your retained emails quickly.
Managing business communication is seamless as the Zoho Mail app can be downloaded in your Android or iOS devices. Interestingly, you can also add social media flavors directly to your mailbox using Streams and tag teams, comment, share files, and manage tasks easily.
Rackspace
If you are looking for an affordable email hosting for your business, Rackspace is one of the best options you have. Small businesses can give their emails a professional look without investing much. Through premium filtering, your inbox would be free from spams and malicious activities. Besides, it also gives you complete privacy and security to your sensitive business data.
Rackspace also provides you with smooth migration from your previous emails to new professional emails with their highly dedicated experts. Just keep in mind where you had registered your domain name and leave the rest to Rackspace experts.
At an affordable price of just $2.99 per user every month, Rackspace offers everything you would need for seamless running of your business emails, including:
- 25 GB mailbox
- Outlook, webmail, and mobile access
- Unlimited group list, aliases, and forwarding
- Email Archiving
Microsoft 365
Create business-class emails by choosing Microsoft 365 as your email host and stay in-sync always. Access your emails, shared calendars, and contacts from anywhere using your device, whether it is your computer or mobile phone.
In case you lose your phone with all your business emails on it, do not panic! You still have the option to wipe off the emails remotely in order to keep your business information safe. Microsoft 365 gives you the freedom to customize your every email by creating custom formats, using your domain name and images, etc.
You can send files up to 150 MB using this email hosting. It also provides 100 GB storage to let you store your emails with custom images and formats. With a straightforward admin center, you can manage your emails better, including creating new accounts, deletion, custom script creation, and so on.
Microsoft 365 gives you the best anti-spam filtering and anti-malware protection to safeguard your emails against potential cybercrimes. Besides, you also get archive features and eDiscovery.
GoDaddy
Cast an everlasting impression on your customer minds by using professional-looking emails from GoDaddy that compliments your business. It includes easy-to-use features such as contacts, calendars, a webmail portal, and tasks. The emails work great across a wide range of devices, including computers and mobile phones, and syncs automatically to keep your emails up to date.
GoDaddy includes an industry-standard spam filter to provide you with a clean inbox and can block more than 300 million potentially harmful emails every day with its anti-virus filters and 256-bit encryption. It combines automated threat monitors, sophisticated data analytics, and a special team of security experts to offer the highest level of security.
You can easily customize your email address to make it eye-catching and unique to get distinguished in the crowd yet maintain professional looks with ad-free plans. Catch a glimpse of the contents of your email attachments before sending them, use a webmail portal to manage your online space with custom widgets, including sports, weather, news, etc.
Amazon Workmail
Amazon Workmail offers a secure and easy-to-manage business email service, in addition to support for existing mobile and desktop email client apps. Access your emails, calendars, and contacts painlessly by utilizing the client apps of your choice, including Outlook and other native Android or iOS email apps that support the IMAP protocol. You can also access them using your preferred web browser.
Integrate your emails seamlessly with your current corporate directory. It also gives you the option to encrypt data along with its storage location. In addition, you can set up Microsoft Exchange Server interoperability and manage your users, resources, and groups through SDK.
Amazon Workmail provides enterprise-level security to your data through the AWS Key Management Service. It lets you get full control of your emails and data and lets you manage the way you like. It gives 50 GB storage for your emails and data.
Fastmail
Fastmail lets you create emails for your business that can match your website by offering ease of customization. You can smartly manage your emails using one inbox whenever you send and open mails. You can share email folders, contacts, and calendars with your team for the smooth flow of information and schedule your meetings fast.
It offers Topicbox where your teams can share resources and insights and lets you reach the entire team in one place. You can also build your company archive using this feature and administer it. Using Fastmail, you can manage email access levels and use advanced settings to keep your data secure.
Try its 30 days free trial and then choose a suitable plan as per your requirements.
Namecheap
Namecheap is a fast, reliable, and secure email hosting service designed specifically to meet your business needs. Managing your emails, calendar, contacts, and overall email marketing is effortless using this service.
You can even get a free trial of Namecheap for two months to experience the efficacy of this platform and then choose a plan to continue leveraging its benefits on your entire business. It is swiftly compatible with your devices, including Android, Windows, or iOS. It offers domain-based emails, unified inbox, anti-spam protection, HTML signatures, POP3 or IMAP access, and safe email access with its every plan.
Enjoy seamless and secure collaboration with your business email by sharing emails, contacts, documents, appointments, spreadsheets, and task lists. You can expect high performance from the hosting service that you do not have to worry about whether your emails went to the destination or not, Namecheap takes care of it!
The Two-Factor Authentication offers extra security to your emails while keeping your credentials safe. It provides top-notch security through Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) and Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP).
Conclusion
Email is evolving with new and innovative features that help you communicate seamlessly with your customers and prospects. Business emails provide not only a professional touch to your business but also expand your brand presence. With the above-email hosting services, you can easily manage your emails, secure your data, and build trust with your customers.
