A cheap email service may seem appealing when you're first setting up your business and trying to stretch the budget as far as possible.
But cheap email is a false economy. You get what you pay for!
Here's what you DON'T get with a cheap email provider:
- Email reliability
- Decent spam filters
- Good tech support
We recently received an email from a client we built a website for a few years ago. Let's call her Jane. (Sadly and somewhat ironically, Jane's email went to Spam so it took a few days to find!)
Jane was complaining about the amount of spam email she was receiving.
Jane never really understood that her existing email was unrelated to her new website. To her, everything is "online". At our first meeting she mentioned she'd been having email problems, and once we learned which email provider she was using things became clearer. We've seen this before. 😩
We managed Jane's DNS zone via the website hosting account. The only email-related entry was a single A record in the DNS zone, which had not changed and which we confirmed was the only setting required.
Jane has had a variety of experiences with the email provider's tech support. At various times they've told her:
- The spam wasn't their fault because the DNS settings were wrong (nothing had changed, so no).
- Emails weren't sending because the website wasn't configured properly (Jane didn't send email through her website, also no).
- Email was getting lost because her PC wasn't set up properly (it worked before, her PC hadn't changed and she also wasn't getting the mail to her phone, no again).
Lousy tech support, poor spam filters, unreliable email.
If you're serious about your business, consider the impact if emails are not sent or received reliably, or if they end up in spam. Spam filters are essentially an email provider ranking your email and where it comes from using a set of algorithms and rules, and deciding it is more likely junk than not. Some email providers are ranked much lower than others.
If you want to get business email right, we're happy to help! We have experience with email in all environments ranging from small business to enterprise.
