Email: Business Class vs Personal Class

Since my early days on the internet I have used many different types of email, varying in business class or personal use. Like many small business owners before me, when I started my first company I was always looking to keep costs low so buying a domain and setting up Outlook or Google Apps for business was not really on my list of priorities. In this blog post let's examine a few benefits of using business class email for work and what to do if you have been using personal email for work, but have outgrown it.

Benefit #1: Appearance

Let's be honest for a second, if your kitchen sink is leaking would you trust plumberjoes@yahoo.com or joe@plumberjoes.com more to fix your problem? Of course plumberjoes@yahoo.com may do the best plumbing in the world, but for most of us we would automatically associate the more professional looking email address as being the more professional business.

Benefit #2: Administration

Having the ability to manage your team and policies can be a big productivity booster. Setting up aliases, groups and shared mailboxes is an easy way you can make sure that people only need to use one account to access everything they need. Being able to manage your team from one administrator account is leaps and bounds superior to having people setup personal class email accounts for work.

Benefit #3: Security

With business class email you can implement your own password policies, enforce 2 factor authentication and more. If you just let your employees use regular email they can set their passwords to whatever they want and 9 times out of 10 it will be something fairly easy to crack. Even if you ask them to use 2 factor authentication you don't really have a way to enforce it unless you watch them log in all the time and make sure they are using a 2fa app.

Also a big security risk is employees that are no longer with the company. Nobody wants a disgruntled employee that has the ability to respond to customer inquiries, access to contacts and maybe even the ability to change passwords on company logins. Being able to manage your staff means you can lock them out if you have to and still have access to any important info their email has.

But I have been using personal email for years. How do I switch?

Transitioning to business class email in most cases is actually fairly painless. You can have your old email forward to your new email and use autoresponders letting people know that you are using a new email address. This means all of your incoming mail will go to your new account, while letting people know that they should use your new email address moving forward.

In many cases you may be able to import all of your old mail into your new mailbox so you can still find old emails if you need to.

You can send out a mass email to all of your contacts letting them know you are using a new email address which will also help transition people into using your new email account.

All in all, you will very quickly see people moving away from using your old email account, but more importantly anyone who still sends to your old email address will still end up having the email sent to your new one.

To Summarize:

The list of reasons why you should use business class email over personal is quite long and in my opinion well worth the cost. You simply cannot beat the security and features of an administrated business class email platform. If you haven't made the switch yet and have questions about it, we are always here to help.