Finding the best email provider is the top concern for many offices, most especially those who are in sales and marketing and booking business. While most people use their personal emails they get from their ISP, maybe with Google, businesses could use more professional emails, perhaps they can score through Office 365 or Zoho.
Ultimately, if you’re running a creative business, you’ll need to think a lot harder about email accounts, especially if you need to send large files or set up new addresses for employees. If you’ve set up web hosting for your company then it almost certainly comes with enough free email addresses for your needs, but is the entire package going to be enough?
Choosing the Best Email Service Provider
If you’re running a business and you can’t get your email service to work with your company’s domain, then it’s not going to give a great impression when you’re contacting clients. There are those who see business emails with generic addresses like myname@gmail.com either as a scam or spam. So it always pays to go the extra mile of putting up a good email service that carries your business name.
If you are not sure about how to choose the best email service provider for your business, then these ten factors should help you determine a good one:
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Is it to get started?
How easy will it be for your team to get started using the service with the resources you have on hand? Will there be someone on the Email Service Provider side to walk you through the set up process and make sure it’s done properly before you start sending?
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Reporting Features
Are there reporting support/features offered? The Email Service Provider should have a wide variety of reports that allow you to track deliverability, open, and click through rates if you want to manage your campaigns correctly.
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CAN SPAM Compliance
It’s important that the Email Service Provider you choose makes all users comply with the CAN SPAM act. The best email service providers will provide tools that make this compliance easy for you.
- Are there free trials?
Many Email service Providers offer free trials and these let you test out the features before enrolling in a paid plan.
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Are There Contracts Offered?
You should be able to switch or cancel email subscriptions without too much of a headache if the provider is not able to give you with the service you need.
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Is it Simple and Easy to Import Lists
You probably already have an email list file with lots of information that you would like to bring with you. This should be hassle-free.
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Outbound Monitoring Features
It’s important that the Email Service Provider you choose offers monitoring features and feedback loops that make sure your email marketing messages are being delivered to your customer’s inbox.
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IP Addresses
It’s important to understand how the Email Service Provider assigns IP addresses. The IP address you are sending from
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Email Composing Features
Does the Email Service Provider have a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, pre-designed templates and the ability to drop in your own HTML code?
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Email Sending Features
It’s important to be able to schedule emails ahead of time so that you won’t miss an important campaign. Does the Email Service Provider have email sending features that lets you do so and manage the process either through a user interface or a remote connection?
These are the main factors I used to rank the most popular email service providers today. So with all this and more in mind, here’s my rundown of the best email providers around.
Top 3 Best Email Service Providers
Winner of the Best Email Service: Office 365
This is still the most reliable email provider for me. Office 365 is a business email provider with a suite of productivity tools, including word processing and spreadsheets, built around Microsoft Office products. Plan starts at less than $20 monthly but each plan is packed with features that may be more robust than smaller businesses need. So Office 365 is best for larger teams already familiar with Office products.
Office 365 Features
Office 365’s Business Premium plan includes business-class email, differentiating it from Office 365’s standard Business plan which does not. The Premium plan also features a custom email domain address, 24/7 phone and web support, and Microsoft’s chat-based workspace, Teams.
System Storage
Microsoft Office 365 includes 50GB email box and 1TB of OneDrive storage. In comparison, G Suite comes with unlimited storage but lacks a digital notebook service like OneNote.
Security and Accessibility
Office 365 includes data loss prevention and multi-factor authentication. It also features message encryption that allows users to send encrypted email to anyone regardless of what email service recipients use.
Email is accessible online through a browser on a desktop computer, phone, and tablet, and offline via the included Outlook app.
Other Things that I like about Office 365:
- Built-in Spam and Virus Protection
- Own set of collaboration and productivity tools such as Word, Excel, video conferencing, and team messaging.
Where to Find Office 365
If you have a Windows-based computer, chances are you already have tools installed on your machine as part of a Windows upgrade. Hence, getting started should be as easy as clicking on an icon and walking through sign-up using one of their setup wizards. Visit Office 365’s website to learn more.
You can also get the monthly subscriptions at a more affordable rate through Softvire.
Runner-up: G Suite
G Suite is the parent group of Google’s email service, also known as Gmail.
It is more affordable than Office 365. The lowest plan starts at a little over $6 per user, per month.
G Suite features tools like email delegation designed around supporting business communication and collaboration. It can be a great email provider for businesses that need easy access to great apps like Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides, which are all cloud-based.
G Suite Pricing
G Suite’s pricing starts at $6.19/user per month for their basic plan. Business plan is higher at $15.03 per user, per month. Meanwhile, the enterprise plan is the most expensive, priced at $36.85 per user, per month.
The enterprise level plan includes advanced customization and pricing is tailored to a business’s specific needs. However, these rates don’t include web hosting services yet.
Best Budget Email Provider – Zoho
Zoho Workplace is a business email provider that offers a suite of personal productivity tools, advanced analytics, and integration with third-party apps that businesses can start using for free. The service is best if you’re looking for a free email address as part of a larger office productivity service featuring reporting and the ability to scale without changing providers.
Zoho Workplace Pricing
Zoho Workplace has a free plan “forever” that supports up to 5 users. In this free usage, you can already get 5GB/User and 25MB attachment limit. However, you only get web access only.
Paid plans range in price from $1.47/user per month (billed annually) to $8.84/user per month. But you will get additional features like multiple domain hosting, email forwarding, and system integration.
*Note that prices here are in AUD.
Bottom Line
Email is one of the most critical tools for modern business. The best email service providers offer generous storage space, collaboration and productivity tools, and robust virus protection.
Like I already emphasized earlier on in this blog, Office 365 still offers the best value for the price. It has high reliability, tons of available productivity tools, solid security practices, and ease of integration with other products.
