One of the many challenges a small business faces is deciding where to spend their operating budget. No one ever questions spending money on communications tools — email in this case. These tools are essential for the success of a business as it ensures that your business stays in communication with internal and external partners, vendors and clients. Email isn’t going anywhere, it’s a must have that you can’t survive without. Instead of trying to replace your email with another form of communication, change the way you use it and you’ll find that you’ll be just as efficient while saving some of that operating budget.
Google Groups
Groups are a great way of getting messages to multiple people in your organization. When you create the group, you create an email address as well as the members of the group that will receive the messages sent to it. This email address doesn’t add another mailbox to your account and ensures that you can still use a customized email address for the occasion. For example, if you have three sales engineers and you would like all of them to receive messages anyone sends to sales@company.com, you can create a group called Sales and add your three engineers to it. The beauty of this is if your CEO wants to see the emails that come through to that address as well, you can simply add them to the group. Also, if one of the sales engineers leaves the company, then you would remove just that engineer without disruption to the sales@company.com email.
Aliases
Aliases allow your email address to be “known as” something else. These work great for individual use. They allow someone to have several variants of their name route to a single mailbox. For example, the email address elizabeth@company.com can have the aliases beth@company.com and liz@company.com. You can also set aliases for different services that you utilize. In example, beth-salesforce@company.com. You can also create an alias for a group. Just like groups, an alias doesn’t add another mailbox to your account.
Staying Organized
Both groups and aliases allow you to keep your inbox organized. You can create rules specific to the group or alias email address that routes messages to a specific folder or perform some other action. Groups and aliases don’t cost extra and are a good solution if you’re a small business that needs to maintain an efficient process.
