Business Email Solutions

Every business person knows how important email is to their business. Internal communicate often relies on email services, but it is also a critical component to communicating with your customers and marketing to new ones. In fact, according to Everlytic Research, over 63% of South Africa’s population prefer marketing via email! With this in mind, your business needs a reliable solution that is secure and easily to use to maximize the potential of this form of communication.

Why Not Just Use a Free Solution Like Gmail?

Gmail is the most used free email service in South Africa. It’s free and popular. Why not use it? Well, using a free email account for your business means that you are essentially promoting their brand instead of your own. It also doesn’t look professional and gives the impression that a company is not very serious about their future growth. Another reason why it is not ideal is due to the lack of accountability. Anyone can create an email address and call it “johndurbanplumber@gmail.com”, whereas to own an email address like “john@durbanplumbers.co.za” means that the person definitely works at that company.

Using free email accounts for marketing purposes also has its limits, which services like Gmail impose to prevent large amounts of emails to be sent per day. If you wanted to do a massive mail drop from a free email address, chances are that many of those emails won’t even end up in your recipient’s inbox, and that is presuming that they aren’t flagged before they are even sent. For reasons already mentioned above, people generally won’t pay much attention to an email from a random Gmail account, but if it came from a mailbox that is associated with a company domain, they often trust the sender a lot more.

Lastly, using something like Gmail (instead of a corporate email solution) also leaves you with little management control or technical support for your mailbox. Although there are a few things you can do, it is difficult to remain compliant with laws about email archiving, which can land you in all sorts of hot water if you are in an industry where these things are enforced. If you have a team, it also becomes extremely difficult to manage their email accounts, if not impossible in most cases.

What Are the Best Practices For Business Email Addresses?

Your email address is your business identity and reputation so steps need to be taken to ensure it’s perceived in a positive light. First, use your own domain name like “mybusiness.co.za.” If you don’t have a domain, you can usually pick one up for around R150 from your local ISP. If you already have a website, then you definitely have a domain name and the same one can be used for your email communication requirements.

Next, you will need to host the actual mailboxes, which can be done on your own servers or in the cloud. At NCD Solutions, we feel that cloud-based solutions for email are usually the best choice, but every business has different needs and we can accommodate any requirements. While the domain name (mentioned in the previous paragraph) is an annual payment, for the mailboxes (e.g. john@durbanplumbers.co.za), each one has a monthly cost but rest assured, they are not too expensive, even for very small businesses.

Hosted Email Solutions vs Cloud Based Email Services

A hosted email solution basically means that you want to keep your mailboxes, as well as the supporting mail services, within your organization and on your own servers. This doesn’t mean that some components of your email solution cannot be outsourced (such as your mail filtering), but it definitely places the responsibility to managing and maintaining your own hardware (and software) on your companies shoulders. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you have the technical staff already on hand to manage it, but if that is not the case, we highly recommend that you go with our cloud-based email solutions.

A cloud-based email solution will also host your mailboxes and supporting services, but the key difference is that it won’t be done on your servers. In fact, it will be handled by high-tier data centres and you will never need to worry about doing things like replacing hardware, managing the nitty-gritty parts of the software or any high-level administration and troubleshooting. It is as simple as this; you pay for each mailbox, link it up with your Outlook client (or use the web-based option) and you start using it.

Why Should You Let Us Manage Your Business Email Solution?

Based On Your Business Needs – We will do a full assessment of your business and determine what will be the best option for your email. Although we absolutely love cloud based solutions, we have many clients that are better suited for hosted solutions, so all variables will be considered.

Highly Secure and Reliable – No matter where your mail is hosted, it will be completely secure and enjoy a high level of stability. Our team have many years of experience and follow all the latest best practices. We will also investigate opportunities to implement high availability which will make sure that you can always reach your emails, even if there are ongoing problems.

Enterprise Grade Mail Filtering – Although it is an optional extra, we highly recommend that you let us scrub your mail for spam, malware, viruses and other dangerous attachments before the mail even arrives in your mailbox (or hosted servers). This will significantly improve your safety and make sure that time is not wasted with spam mail.