How to setup business email

Business email is an important communication method for your business.  But, it is also a branding opportunity in that you can make your business email have the same domain name as your website.  This will make your email address more professional.

There are a number of types of email servers you can choice.  You could just use a personal email account like Gmail or Outlook.com.  You might be able to get an email address from the same company that hosts your website.  Internet service providers also provide email addresses.  Finally, there are legacy options that are old email providers like AOL, Yahoo or Hotmail.

I recommend you avoid using an email account from the same company hosting your website.  The reason is if you want to change website hosting companies, then you also have to move your email account.  Additionally, I don’t recommend using legacy email providers like AOL or Yahoo because they are outdated providers so it makes your business look outdated too.

The best option for business email is a dedicated email hosting company.  This could be Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) or Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).  These provide full email services for many users along with email distribution groups.  However, they are more difficult to setup.

The easiest option is to go with a personal email address at Gmail or Outlook.com.  You can make the name of the email address be the business name.  These are the easiest to setup.

A compromise option would be to create a personal email account with your business name but then forward your email from an email address using your domain name.  So, you could have an email address of sales@companyname.com that forwards to companyname@gmail.com.  This gives you a more professional email address that you can put on your website or business card but still have the ease of setup with a Gmail account.  This email forwarding can be done at Hover assuming you are hosting your domain name there also.

What is business email

To discuss how to set up business email. So what is business email? Why should a business have an email address? Well, the very most important thing is for communication purposes, one, you may have a phone number, he may have a text message. But people do expect that businesses do have email. So right there makes it look more professional. The other reason, the other aspect of a business email is to match the domain name. So you have a domain name for your website, it’s a good idea to set that up so that that same domain name is used for your email. This provides for consistent branding across your communication methods.

Types of email servers

So there are a number of different types of email servers that you can use to create a business email. The first one is to basically use the personal email services that already exist and use that as your business email. So this could be things like Gmail, when you’re hosting your website, many website hosting companies also provide you an option of hosting an email server with them. Usually, it’s included in the price or maybe a few dollars extra. One way or another, you probably have internet service through a provider such as Comcast, they may also provide you an email address. And then there are some kind of legacy ones. And by this, they kind of fit more in the fit more that there are personal email services that are just older. So this could be things like AOL, or Yahoo, things like that.

Options to avoid for business email

So I do recommend some of these though they’re devoid. The first one is website hosting. So yes, the website host or well may provide you an email service. But if you ever want to change your email hosting, or excuse me your website hosting, then you have to also migrate your email hosting. So it’s actually a really good idea to split those two things. Just use website hosting for websites, and use email hosting just for email. Additionally, I kind of do recommend that you avoid the legacy options. For example, you may be able to have an email account at AOL, or maybe have one at a service called earthlink. Or maybe have a with another older personal email service like Hotmail, I recommend avoiding those just because those do have the appearance of being well old and outdated. And that’s not a branding message you’d want to put towards your company.

Best options for business email

So what are the best options? Well, is actually to set up dedicated email hosting somewhere that you would do for your website. So there are actually two major players in this field, there are others, but I just bring these up because can go wrong picking either Microsoft or Google, both of them allow you to set up an email service. You can set up your own domain name for those. And then they provide robust features either for multiple mailboxes, easy connection for smartphones, options for other email distribution groups to expand the number of email addresses you have hosted, they do cost a few dollars per month per user. But again, you get the full functionality of an email service without having it tied into either your website, or one of the legacy personal ones.

Easiest options for business email

But I will admit the easiest option, because setting up those other two do take more effort are just to basically get one of the more popular personal email services that are out there. Many people are familiar with Gmail for their personal email. So I mean, I understand just get a Gmail account for your business, you know, business name@gmail.com. If you’re more familiar with some of the Microsoft ecosystems, outlook.com provides the same thing, you could have your business name@outlook.com, so I get it, they’re easier. And if you’re going to go at least go with one of the two modern ones. Plus, you’ll get a lot more features on integrations to smartphones and things like that.

Compromise solution for business email

But I did want to kind of bring up a compromise options, because I do believe there is a lot of benefits of having using your business domain with your email address for branding purposes and look more professional. But I realize that things like Gmail and outlook.com are easier to set up. So basically do is set up email forwarding. So this way you have an email address with your domain name, but you forward it to your company, personal email service, you get the benefits of the branding, and, but also just don’t have to do all the setups if you wanted to go with a full fledged one. Fortunately, I recommend hover for your domain hosting and one of the secondary services they do offer is a very reasonably priced email forwarding service. So since you’re already hosting the domain, their email forwarding is simply a command that no email gets stored. So it’s not like if some reasoning Want to use hover, you can change your email forwarding at any time in the future.

Demonstration of forwarding business email using Hover

So I’d like to show you a demo of basically how to create an email forwarding at hover, and then how to forward that email to say, for example, a Gmail account. Okay, let me go ahead and show you how to set up business email, in this case using email forwarding from a company called hover. So the first thing we would have to have had is a personal email account set up. A couple recommendations for this compromise solution are either Gmail or outlook.com. So in this case, we’ll go and connect to a Gmail account. Now I’m not going to go through the whole process of showing you how to set up a Gmail account. But it is very straightforward. But anyways, before we set up the forwarding, we just want to double check everything.

Login into Gmail account

So go ahead and log into your email at gmail so that you have that ready. Okay, and once you’re logged in Gmail account, you should Carsey any of your email. The thing to check here is basically, and I mean, this is pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to double check that you know, what your Gmail email address is, if you’re not sure you need to refresh your memory, you just go up here to your icon, where it’s your login, and it will say the name. So in this case, it’s house service company who@gmail.com. So we’ll need that in a second. Okay, so now we have set up our personal email account that we’re going to use for our business can in this case, kind of business name@gmail.com.

Login into Hover account

So next, we’re going to go ahead and set up the email forwarding using a company called hover now, to use however, you would have to be already hosting your domain name name there for your website. So again, there are little prerequisites for this. But if you’ve already bought your web, excuse me your domain name from hover, then adding email forwarding on there is a single step process. So to do that, go ahead and log into your hover account, which again, is at hover Comm. And go ahead and do the sign in and enter your information to log into the control panel. Okay, once you’re logged into your hover account, you’ll see your overview here on your dashboard, you want to go to the emails tab. And you’ll have the option here. Now, in order to do this test, I have already purchased it, but we can just see if we wanted to buy more, it’ll give you the option of picking from the different things from a mile forward, you can actually host email here if you wanted to. So there are a couple of different services that hover offers at different price ranges.

Create email forwarding

But again, in this case, we’re just looking for the mail forwarding. So since we already have one Ford created, we’ll go ahead and hit the plus sign here. And it’ll ask us which domain do we want to use. In this case, it’s only one, we happen to have this one mailbox type available. So we can pick that the Ford name, this is what we want to Ford. So this is the name you’d want to actually publish about your business. But in this case, since it’s from your domain name, could be your name, such as your first name. So it could be Matt could be a generic name you might want to use for your business. So it could be sales or information or estimates, again, kind of the option is up to you.

In this case, I’m just gonna use my first name. So Matt, and forward to this is basically where you want that information to, or email address of the Gmail account you want to so again, ours was house service, proxy, I forgot. So this per example, company can go back refresh our memory real quick. And again, house service company, house service company. w a@gmail.com. Okay, there. If you wanted to do another forward, you could set that up. But again, we’re only going to do the one. So we’ll go ahead and create the foreword. And we have that active So again, we refresh review here we have Matt at how service company comm is being forward to how surfeit house service company law@gmail.com and shows us when it there, the auto renews basically just again, that $5 a year purchase you’ve placed and if you wanted to edit the one that it’s doing, you could go into there.

Test email forwarding

So that’s it pretty much set up on hover, but like any good theme when we make a change in configuration, we do want to test this. So I just logged into a different email account. I’m going to go ahead and send it to the email address. Let’s type in a quick subject test sent today This is a test. Okay, so again, we’re sending it to the email address that is matched to our domain name that we set on hover. So in this case mad at our service company, comm, hover will then automatically forward that to our gmail account. So we’ll go and hit send here, KB emails off, come back into Gmail, do a quick refresh. And there we see that our email address has been sent. So again, this email was sent to Matt at how service company calm, but because we set up the email 40, on hover, it automatically was four off to our gmail account, which was the house service company w a@gmail.com.

So you can put the email address on your website, on your business card or things like that. And through the 14 that only cost $5 a year through hover, you’re able to afford that into your Gmail account. If you were to respond, let’s go ahead and reply back to this message just so you kind of see how that works. So hit reply, say, I got your message and hit send. Okay, so that message has been sent, we’ll go back to in this case, our outlook to now go back into the email address where we sent it. Here’s the message that we replied to from our gmail account. And it says I got your message.

However, in this case, it does show that it came from the Gmail address this is one of the limitations of email forwarding is that it doesn’t really appear to come from where they thought they sent. However, if you do brand, your Gmail account similar to your business name, obviously, they’ll see their message here, and then it was actually received. So again, it’s not ideal, the ideal solution is again to set up a full email hosting service from a company or from a service like Microsoft 365, or Google workspaces. And that way, you can actually have a true mailbox, not just an email for where you can send and reply to emails. But again, that step does take more.

Conclusion about business email

The email forwarding from hover in conclusion is again a very simple way, it’s a compromise way that you can still create a free personal email account, say at gmail or outlook.com, but yet still have a professional looking email for you even though you’re going to be responding from the other one. So hope this helps. So So comes some conclusions about business email. So again, why do you want to have business email it helps with making you look more professional and having consistent branding. Please try to avoid legacy and email hosting with your website hosting thing. The best solution is to get a dedicated email service say at my Microsoft 365, or Google workspace, but if you want just a compromise solution, an email forwarding option through hover is a great compromise.