Set Up a Personalised Email Address for Your Niche Site
08 of September 2016
HollieIf you’ve decided to create your own niche website and have purchased your domain, you’ll almost certainly want to create a personalised email address that includes the name of your website.
NoraThere are some domain name registrars such as godaddy.com who offer email as part of their web hosting packages, but Google Apps offers lots of great additional tools that you will find extremely useful for your business.
HollieWhen we were setting up SOP Templates, we looked at quite a few different services, even some free ones (and who doesn’t like a freebie?!). But, we both agreed that Google Apps was the best option, because frankly we can’t live without all the apps, integrations and features that have become essential to us in our business.
NoraAlthough Google offers a free email service, Gmail, a personalised email address such as ‘email@yourdomain.com’ is far more professional and helps build trust between you and your customers.
HollieEven though I used it myself many moons ago, I would stay away from the other well known free email service providers like hotmail and yahoo (sorry!) if you’re going to use your email address to communicate with your customers. I also recommend keeping the first half of the email simple by using a first name or a noun.
NoraGoogle allows for a lot of versatility and functionality in its business tools. Whether you are using Google Analytics to track website data, or are using Google Draw to create graphs and diagrams for your business, the Google suite is definitely made to integrate well across its Apps.
While creating a business account with Google does have a small fee, it is incredibly affordable considering all the benefits you get that is useful for any business, including storage and access to Google sites where you can create and share company information.
HollieSome of the great functions of Google Apps include being able to sync across all your devices. Not only can you access your Gmail account and Google Apps on your desktop computer but also on your mobile devices. With Google Apps, you get 30GB of storage to store your emails plus Google Drive documents, spreadsheets and slides that you need for your business.
NoraSince I started to use Gmail and Google Drive, I save all my files as a Google document or a spreadsheet. That way, if I ever need to pass on an SOP to a freelancer, or just check a file on my phone, they’re always accessible.
HollieIf you’re going to be working with other team members, you’ll almost certainly be taking advantage of Google Drive. The permission settings in Google Apps are highly flexible and allows you to set very specific sharing settings between you and your co-workers or freelancers. You can give people full access to your documents and folders and allow them to edit files. Alternatively, if you only want to share a single folder, you can give ‘read only’ access to certain people in your team. Another setting allows your team members to leave comments on your work, without changing the actual document.
NoraLuckily, Google keeps a record of every change you make on a document, so if you accidentally makes changes to a file (I’m talking from experience here), you can revert back to a previous version (phew!).
HollieIf you’re using Google Apps for Work on your site you’ll probably want to create email addresses such as ‘support@yourdomain.com’ or ‘info@yourdomain.com’ that you can add in the initial setup of Google Apps, or go back and create them later.
NoraSetting up Google Apps for Work can easily be outsourced by passing this SOP on to your freelancer.