You have a business website and you wonder how to get a business email address. Because not all customers want to communicate by phone or social media. A table at the end of this article compares all the major solutions.
Free email address
You may have started your business with a free email address at Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Microsoft Outlook but it looks amateurish.
If you want customers to open your emails, the email address needs to match the domain name of your website.
For example: your website is called mybusiness.com.au. Your email address should be [email protected] and not [email protected]
You also need your emails to be sent from a reputable email hosting provider or they may be flagged as spam by your customers’ email provider.
And keep in mind that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are not charities. These companies will still try to monetise their free service by collecting personal information about you, bombarding your screen with distracting ads, etc.
So here’s a few professional email solutions for Australian businesses.
Bundling your email address with your web hosting plan
Most web hosting companies provide a control panel such as cPanel or Plesk. This control panel include a mail server that allows email forwarding, junk mail filtering, email synchronisation with your favourite mail app, webmail, etc. You can usually create 1 or more email addresses at no extra cost.
The main problems are:
- Storage is limited. The website and emails share the same storage defined in your web hosting plan. If you send/receive many emails with file attachments, you may quickly run out of diskspace. You could upgrade to the next plan but this may not be cost-effective.
- Your emails are more likely to be flagged as spam. This means that your customers may never see them. This is because on “shared hosting” plans, servers hosts hundreds of websites. If one of these websites has a bad reputation (eg blacklisted), your emails will be penalised too.
Professional email hosting
There are many solutions to choose from. I’ve listed below an Australian solution as well as the 2 biggest players in the industry: Google and Microsoft.
Australian Email Hosting at VentraIP
VentraIP is the most trusted Australian owned and operated web/email hosting company. Their support is local and really helpful.
They offer business email hosting in their datacentre in Australia so your data doesn’t leave our country.
The web interface looks dated compared to Gmail or Outlook but if you set up your email account in your favourite Mail app then you won’t notice much difference. Spam filtering options are limited so you’ll need to manage spam/junk mail directly from your Mail app.
You will like this if you need affordable email hosting.
Yearly plans start at $35/email address.
Google Workplace
Google offers a lot of free services but if you need a business email address then you’ll need to purchase one of their Google Workplace plans.
Like Google free accounts, Workplace accounts storage is shared amongst all apps (G Drive, G Photos, Gmail, etc).
You will like Google Workplace if you’re already familiar with Gmail and even more if you have an Android smartphone.
Yearly plans start at $119.
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions offer 1 business email address with or without Microsoft Office apps.
This includes 1 Gb of cloud storage for your files but email storage is limited to 50 Gb with apparently no possibility of upgrading.
You will like Microsoft 365 if you’re already using the Microsoft Outlook app on your computer and/or your mobile device.
