Email hosting providers can provide countless benefits for anyone with an online presence. Some of the most important benefits of email hosting and why you should consider it are presented below:
Improve Professionalism With Your Own Custom Domain
Let's say that we're starting a business. Hypothetically, we've purchased our domain name EmailHosting.com. We've also created an awesome website on our domain name EmailHosting.com. Now, let's say that we've listed our contact information including email addresses in a support area on our website. If we list our sales email address as emailhostingsales@gmail.com, we may still be able to send/receive email if we have registered this free email account. However, this does not project the professional image that we should want for our business.
We would be better served to use sales@emailhosting.com for reaching our sales staff. We could also create other email addresses on our domain such as management@emailhosting.com, support@emailhosting.com, etc. to separate our department contact email addresses. Doing so provides more credibility and legitimacy for our business.
Boost Brand Awareness and Loyalty
When we send or respond to email messages using an email address on our domain name, it indirectly pushes and builds brand loyalty as well. Let's say for example that we receive an email message at sales@emailhosting.com inquiring about the cost and features of our low-cost email hosting service. Let's say that we respond to janedoe@gmail.com with the requested information. Jane Doe could possibly forward our email message to 10 other people that she has in her contacts. Instantly, when these 10 other people read her message, they could possibly see our email address sales@emailhosting.com which could lead them to go directly to EmailHosting.com to view our services. Now, if janedoe@gmail.com had forwarded our email message with the generic email address emailhostingsales@gmail.com, there may not be that inclination to check out EmailHosting.com. They may happen to visit EmailHosting.com if we have it in our email signature; however, it's easy to see how using our own domain name in our email address provides that added brand push.
Using an Email Hosting Provider is Cost-Effective
There are companies that may choose to run their own email servers and hire an IT staff to handle the equipment and server maintenance. While this may seem like a good idea, many companies are realizing that it's very costly to operate in this manner and that using an email hosting provider serves their interests better and proves to be more cost-efficient.
Email hosting companies are in the business of providing email services. Their staff usually consists of experts in this area. And so, leaning towards using an email hosting provider that meets your requirements usually ends up working best. Companies are able to focus on their business and leave the worries of managing email servers to the experts.
Outlook, Smartphone and Third-Party Connections
What if don't want to use the webmail interface that the email hosting provider offers? That's a legitimate concern. Let's say that we're accustomed to using Outlook and that we are hesitant to change to using a new email service with a new platform/interface.
We can alleviate that concern because most email hosting providers allow us to connect to Outlook and other third-party email services and smartphones using IMAP or POP3. Email hosting providers typically offer step-by-step tutorials and/or videos that make these setups a cinch even for the non-technical person. So, we may be able to continue using the same email interface as in the past even with the new email hosting service.
Spam/Viruses and Security
Well, we can all probably attest to using free email providers where a large majority of the email messages that we receive is spam. Why should anyone want to continue weeding through all of the spam each day wasting countless minutes/hours that can be used for more productive work or free time. This is a major opportunity cost.
Most email hosting services are built to eliminate spam and deliver legitimate messages to our inboxes so that we don't have to filter through spam in our inbox or find legitimate messages in our spam folder. We can admit that this is sometimes a major frustration point for many email users.
Email hosting services generally encrypt messages so that secure receipt and delivery of messages is made possible. Most email hosting providers will have the proper security protocols in place to ensure that our email messages are safe and secure.
Email Hosting Features
Email hosting services usually come packed with a host of features. From archiving, backups, generous disk space, unlimited aliases, unlimited forwarders, signatures, calendar sharing, address books, guaranteed uptime, spam/virus filtering, large attachments, auto-responders, whitelists, blacklists, vacation replies, etc, there's usually a feature that covers what we already have in mind.
We strongly feel that email hosting is a must-have for any business that wants to take advantage of reliable and secure email communications. With the right provider, businesses can benefit from features and benefits like internet security, archiving capabilities, data backup, customization options, scalability, and more.
Best of all, most email hosting services come with a free trial. So, we would encourage anyone seeking the benefits of email hosting to seriously consider signing up for a free trial even if it is only to test out the services and check out all of the benefits.