Every business needs an email address which it can use to communicate, and stay in contact, with its clients and customers. Any serious business owner will know that if they want to be taken seriously, they cannot keep using a Gmail or Yahoo! account.
The reasons are that, for one, these types of free accounts aren’t really convenient for use in a corporate environment and, more importantly, it just wouldn’t leave a good impression when a business tells its clients that its email address ends with .gmail or .yahoo.com. It is unprofessional and downright embarrassing.
The alternatives to these free email services are owning and a running a corporate email server (installed and administered from the businesses’ own premises) or the cheaper and more viable option for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs): using hosted email solutions.
What are they?
Email hosting providers offer their services whereby they manage their clients’ email requirements from their own servers by using dedicated, customized email platforms.
The two email protocols types that are most commonly offered by such hosting providers are POP3-based emails and web-based emails, while the most commonly used front-end email interface applications include the likes of SquirrellMail, RoundCube and Horde.
Now, that we have seen and cleared all that up, let us have a look at the advantages that hosted email solutions offer, or bring to, SMBs:
Professionalism: as we have seen earlier, businesses that can’t afford to have their own mail servers (with their own domain name extensions) need to make use of hosted email solutions if they want to be taken seriously. No one wants to do business with SMBs that can’t even have their own domain names in their email addresses.
Creating Trust: at one time or another, we have all received spam and, especially, phishing email in our inboxes that say they were sent from some large tech company or bank and yet have senders’ email addresses that end with domain names from the free email service providers.
The very first sign that an email is of suspicious nature is when it portrays to be from a well-established company and yet has a .gmail address.
Businesses, therefore, can also be viewed with suspicion if they send out emails using these same free services – especially when they are offering deals or are regarding financial or personal data inquiries.
Cutting Operating Costs: owning and running an email server is not a cheap endeavor. SMBs can rarely afford an efficient email server and system. It is not just the cost of hardware that they could do without, but costs that come from the software packages and applications that are required – which are costly when it comes to corporate versions – as well as annual license charges and costs of additional supporting software (antivirus etc.) that are required to protect the servers and their users.
Add to that the cost of a server room, other peripheral devices (networking etc.) and the salaries of the people who are going to run and administer it all, and it becomes clear that outsourcing the whole affair is much cheaper and cost effective.
Efficient and Reliable Service: SMBs are assured of better email service from the hosting providers than if they were to run and host their own email servers from their own premises. The providers have made the service their bread-and-butter and know how to make it all work perfectly with the most experienced of them being able to deliver solutions that perfectly meet all of their clients’ requirements.
SMBs may be great at providing their primary services but will almost always be clueless when it comes to running servers – they can therefore focus on their business and let the providers worry about the email technology for them.
Ease of Use: once SMBs have signed up with an email hosting provider it is pretty straightforward and easy to use the service – all configurations and customizations are dealt with by the provider. It is a matter of firing up a browser or starting an application and that takes care of the connection to the server.
All required server upgrades, patching and general administration are handled by the provider. This means no headaches for the clients.
More Security: email hosting providers already have all the security measures in place. They know what to do to keep their clients’ information secure. They also have the expertise to help clients keep their data safe from prying eyes on the users’ end. This expertise can be used to develop a safe-usage policy by the SMBs.
The providers will also have data recovery plans which come in handy in case of data loss. In most cases, all it takes is restoration of backups, but on rare occasions much more might be needed to be done.
Easily Customizable: arriving at the perfect custom-configuration of an email service is easy when it is outsourced. Once the requirement has been outlined, the provider can easily propose the best solution for the client.
Later, in case there is a need to up- or down-grade, it can be so arranged with relative ease as hosted email solutions are also very scalable.
In closing, unless SMBs are in the tech industry themselves – and sometimes even then – it would be a smart choice to outsource their corporate email service to hosted email solution providers.
