Best email services for small businesses

Which dental practice would you choose to contact given the following email addresses: info@pearlybrightsmiles.com or toothymike88@gmail.com? It’s probably safe to assume you’d pick the first one. Research shows that 65 percent of consumers believe a company-branded email is more credible than a business using a free email account.

Although it may initially seem insignificant, there is a bigger takeaway here than just email. It’s really all about building credibility and branding; essentially, the impression your business is promoting to the outside world. And for small companies in today’s competitive market, branding is how one business will stand out from another.

With a range of different email hosting providers available, how do small businesses choose the best email platform? To give you a helping hand, we will walk you through everything needed to get your communications going:

Email Services for Small Business Benchmarks

Before we talk about email services for your small business, let’s discuss why you need a professional email service.

Branded emails tend to give a correct first impression from anyone who sees your email address. You may have  a Gmail or Hotmail personal account, but you need a mail host that allows you to use your business domain. Keep in mind that it’s all about branding. Every email, you are trying to build credibility and branding. You want the impression of your business to be positive and professional.

Apart from branding, business email services also tend to give you solid cybersecurity, bulk email marketing capabilities and data storage.

When choosing email service providers, you want to evaluate the following criteria: 

• • PRICE: The cost of basic email service as well as the cost of paid upgrades or any other service fees

• • AVAILABLE STORAGE: The service provider’s policies with regard to email attachment size and general data storage

• • SECURITY: How each service protects your data, their claims regarding their reliability of service as well as how easy it is to access your messages on a mobile device, desktop or browser-based client

• • SPAM & VIRUS PROTECTION: Built-in spam and virus protection

• • ACCESS TO APPS: Other communication and collaboration tools included with email hosting, which might lessen a business’ reliance on emails alone like Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Skype or instant messaging

• • SYSTEM INTEGRATION: Ability to integrate with third-party apps and other office productivity tools
  • EASE OF INTEGRATION: User interfaces like webmail, administrative set-up requirements and user reviews

• • SCALABILITY: The number of email addresses each service provided and if they included features like email aliases

Based on the criteria above, we believe G Suite is the best, followed by Office 365 and Zoho Mail:

1. Gmail G Suite

Google’s Gmail prides itself on being an ultra-reliable server for businesses, which guarantees 99.9% uptime. As well as using G Suite for sending and receiving business email, you can use their add-on tools for for customer relationship management, word processing/ spreadsheets, video conferencing, cloud storage and file sharing, all invaluable tool for greater team efficiency and collaboration.

What makes this remarkable is Google Drive’s terabytes of cloud storage, coupled with their 24/7 support.

G Suites starts at $5 per month per user and so it’s great for small businesses that need a flexible and scalable email provider with easy access to great apps.

2. Office 365

Office 365 Business is an email service sold by software giant Microsoft. This provides an all-in-one service for everything that you will need for your small business. The entire bundle combines Microsoft’s Outlook for Business, MS Office applications for productivity, Skype for Business for collaboration efforts and OneDrive for cloud storage.

Microsoft’s solution is inexpensive ($4 per user per month) and scalable. It’s perfect for growing businesses who need robust business email services. The network is also highly-secure and has 24/7 global support, so you can be sure to get the highest uptime.

While Office 365 is a terrific option for teams and businesses that are already familiar with tools like Word and Excel, it does integrate with as many newer business tools emerging in the market designed to help automate business processes like G Suite does. For this reason, it’s best for teams whose primary businesses needs are met with Microsoft products alone.

3. Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is the perfect cross between free email services and paid email services. Their primary targets are small businesses and startups. Their free email bundle provides email addresses for 25 users per business domain. Every mailbox they have has 5GB free storage and ready-to-use with your domain. Their initial free offering is astonishing — available only for commercial level programs.

While the free plan includes 5GB of storage and supports email attachments up to 25MB, it does not include the advanced email functionality found with Zoho’s paid plans including internet message access protocol (IMAP) and post office protocol (POP) support, active sync or integration with other tools like Zoho’s in-house document writer, chat, video conferencing or third-party integrations like Google Apps. 

The paid plans range in price from $2 per user per month to $8 per user per month and include additional features like multiple domain hosting, personalisation of the dashboard, cloud storage, email forwarding and system integration.

Need more help setting up your business’ email?

When choosing email service providers, gauge what is essential for your business. If you need more advice about which provide to choose, or help in setting up and configuring your email, get in touch with the team at Tekkie Help.Biz.

Tekkie Help.Biz is a boutique IT support company optimised for small and medium sized businesses. We pride ourselves on our personal approach to customer service. We can help with all elements of IT for your business such as setting up your network, procuring equipment, setting up your website and email and supporting IT needs on a daily basis. We’re the team of experts you can rely on each time, every time.

Talk to us. Tell us what you need. We’re here to take care of all your technology requirements.