Back in the day (the older I get, the more of my stories tend to start this way), when you signed up for web hosting, they would give you free, unlimited email accounts with it. (Technically, many of them still offer this today.)
Why not? It costs them next to nothing, and you can have dozens of email addresses on your account with unlimited storage.
It’s often one of their selling points, and you’re thinking “Score!” because now you have a snazzy new email address like me@nullmyawesomebusinessname.com that matches your awesome domain name (that you brainstormed about for hours), and you’re starting to look like a real, grown-up business.
Cool, right?!
But, over the years, unfortunately, the free email on these web hosts has become more and more unreliable.
I and many of my clients started experiencing odd problems with it. For instance…
- If the server your website lives on goes down, your email account goes down with it which means your clients can’t get in contact with you that way. (Boo!)
- Randomly, emails you send – either from your regular email inbox or through your email marketing service like Aweber or Mailchimp get flagged as Spam for no discernible reason. (What the heck?!)
- Spam shows up in your account in droves. 5 or 10 Spam messages a day is annoying, but 80 or 100 spam messages a day is seriously unmanageable. And web hosts just don’t have all that great of tools to help you combat this. (UGH! as my ten-year-old daughter is so fond of saying these days.)
- Plus, it’s not that easy to set up, and it’s kind of awkward to access. If you ever have to use a webmail app to get to it, you’ll feel like you’re back in the 90’s.
So it turns out that there are lots of not so amazing “features” to this free account that is suddenly not feeling all that free anymore.
Enter G Suite
G Suite is the current ‘trendy’ name for what used to be called Google Apps (or Google for Business or Google for Work – I think they might be having some kind of identity crisis because they change the name of this service on a semi-regular basis, and it does get a little bit confusing. But fortunately, it’s still the same, awesome service.)
Google, despite all their big-brother types of faults, does offer a stellar email program and productivity suite (calendar, tasks, document storage and sharing, etc.).
You’ll recognize the G Suite email program as Gmail and their calendar is good old Google Calendar. Only with G Suite, instead of having mybusinessname@nullgmail.com, all of this is tied to your branded domain name, just like it would be if you were taking advantage of the free email account on your web host.
Yes, it costs a little bit of money, but it’s very worth it, and I’m going to tell you why.
“Wait a minute. So why don’t I just use mybusinessname@nullgmail.com which I can get for free?” you ask?
That’s a valid question. Thanks for asking.
When you use a branded email account like myname@nullmyawesomebusinessname.com to communicate with potential clients, it’s flat-out more professional and more personable, and so much of business today is about personal connection.
A branded email account shows people that you’re “in this”. You’re not just futzing around with a hobby business.
Plus email marketing services – like Mailchimp or Aweber – don’t like to send your emails out when it looks like it’s coming from a free email service like Yahoo or Gmail because they are easy to get and used by spammers a lot so your emails (and the email marketing service’s reputation) are more likely to be flagged as Spam.
So now that that’s out of the way…
Here’s why G Suite hits it out of the park.
Superior Spam Management
This right here is the be all to end all reason for signing up for G Suite. When you have an email address that you’re sharing in any kind of public way – whether it be business cards or on websites or social media profiles or subscribing to someone else’s email list – it is bound to be picked up by the Spam bots sooner or later. And once that happens, it’s game over for your nice clean inbox. And the longer you have that email address, the worse it gets.
Google spend a kajillion dollars and at least that many man hours researching and actively combating this. They have the best Spam management in the game, bar none.
So let’s put that to work for you to help protect your business email account!
Easier to set up across multiple devices
Plus there are multiple ways to get at it.
I have an email client that I run on my laptop called eM Client (which is a fantastic little program by the way. I’ve used it for years and I absolutely love it – kind of like an old version of Microsoft Outlook which I used and loved up until about 2007 when it kind of went off the rails, but I digress…)
Anyhow, I can manage my G Suite email and my calendar with my eM Client application (many of my clients use their Mac Mail or other desktop client applications); I can easily get to both email and my calendar on my phone, and if all else fails, I can get to it simply through a web browser. All the same email – lots of different places I can access it.
Heaven forbid, if my laptop goes belly-up one day, I’ve got immediate, fully redundant access to all of my client communications and work obligations still. So at least I’m not hosed.
Awesome tools and integrations
This is where G Suite really gets interesting.
Because it’s so popular and so robust, it has become highly extensible (meaning lots of people create programs that let you ‘extend’ its functionality beyond the G Suite borders.) There are literally hundreds of web services outside of Google that integrate with Gmail and Google Calendar to make your life easier.
For instance, I can easily connect my calendar to my Timetrade account so that my clients and prospective clients can easily schedule appointments with me without all the back and forth availability checking via email.
Or, I can flag an email and have it automatically added to my Toodledo task list to follow up on at a later date. Can’t do that with free email on your web host!
This is one of those things that you don’t really know what you’re missing out on until you start exploring and leveraging the possibilities, but it is definitely worth it.
I can go on…
G Suite gives you tons of storage space for email and any documents you need to share online. It’s not unlimited, no, but 15G’s, which comes with your account by default, is nothing to sneeze at. And purchasing more space, if you happen to need it, won’t break the bank.
Having your email separate from your web hosting is actually a good thing. If you need to move web hosting – whether you’re irritated at your current host (which happens quite a lot) or simply outgrowing them and need more robust service – having your email entirely separate makes that migration process so much easier.
Did I mention the Spam management? This one right here is worth the meager investment – just $5/month (I feel a bit like an infomercial, but really, as far as the gamut of premium internet services run, this one is a steal).
Web hosts that sell shared hosting these days are starting to recognize that they’re not really meant to be in the email game, and many of them even make it relatively easy for you to switch to something like G Suite.
I’ve been on G Suite for almost 5 years now, but it’s only been in the past year or two that I’ve really been encouraging my clients to migrate because of the state of the “free” email offered by web hosts. I can’t imagine going back.
