Google Apps is a hosted suite of Google applications that uses your branded domain name, giving you an email and collaboration environment that is accessible from any browser. The free version includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.
So you’re probably wondering what this has to do with marketing? Most of my clients’ prefer Gmail over the hosted email solution because it is accessible, reliable and easy to use, but as a marketer, I would prefer that my clients use an email address that reflects their website domain. Setting up Google Apps gives you the best of both worlds.
Benefits of using Google Apps
- Your email is sent using your own domain for branding, but you are still using Gmail and taking advantage of the 7GB of storage.
- You don’t need a separate mail client on your PC or Mac, however Google Apps Gmail does integrate with Outlook or Apple Mail via iMap. I’m still synching with Outlook so I have copies of important emails locally but have easy integration of my email accounts with my Android smartphone and tablet.
- Google Apps Gmail is reliable and if you want to pay $5 per month for the Google Apps for Business, you get a 99.9% up time guarantee SLA (service level agreement ) and 24×7 support (see comparison chart below).
- Gmail has one of the best spam filters I’ve experienced. I had an email account that was getting serious quantities of spam. I forwarded the email to my personal Gmail account and reduced my spam by at least 90% if not more.
- Google provides enhanced security through a single sign on option (SSO), forced SSL (note the https), custom password strength requirements and more to ensure your email account is secure.
- Shared email servers at most hosts have the challenge of ensuring their IP addresses stay off the ISP blacklists due to SPAM, which is near impossible to monitor. Unfortunately, you as a user won’t know until you get an email returned from someone with an error indicating that your IP address has been blocked. Google has specific sending limits to prevent this from happening.
- Google Calendar integrates with Outlook via Google Calendar Sync which helps you keep your schedule available in Outlook and on your smartphone or tablet.
- Contacts can be exported from Outlook and imported into Google Contacts. When you import your contacts, contacts are updated if there is a duplicate. So although there isn’t any automated sync of your contacts, an occasional export / import takes care of keeping your contacts up to date across all your environments.
The Quirks
- Messing with the Domain Name Server at my hosting account is stressful exercise that I normally prefer to avoid. I don’t like touching things that could render my entire online presence useless. However, Google walks you through how to Switch MX records at your domain host and point your email to their servers.
- I would really love to integrate all my Google (i.e. Gmail) accounts under one dashboard while keeping them separate. I now have 3 separate accounts – personal, business (which I use for Google+) and now one under the Masterful Marketing domain. I would definitely keep my personal Gmail account separate, but it would be nice to have my Google+ account, Google Reader and both Gmail accounts accessible through one interface. From the browser you can’t log into multiple Google accounts simultaneously. I managed to solve the problem for my calendar by sharing the one that syncs with Outlook and smartphone/tablet with the Google Apps account. And although you can integrate Gmail accounts, I’d rather keep the inboxes separate.
If you are a small business with under 10 user accounts, you can use the free version, giving you a very good alternative to your hosted email solution. Once you try the free version, you may wish to purchase the Google Apps for Business at $50 a year per user to gain the benefits of more applications, more storage and more support. The following is the comparison chart:
Google Apps Comparison
For many of my clients, Google Apps is the best option to ensure they have a branded email address while still enjoying the simplicity of Gmail.
Have you considered using Google Apps for your email solution for your business? If you use them, let me know your experiences!
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