Outsourcing any element of your business essentially boils down to the same thing – the less you have to worry about in-house, the more time that you will create for yourself to focus on the more important matters of growing your business.
Email most definitely falls into this category.
IT is of course still the most critical communication tool for practically every company in the world, and your SME will be no different. You will use email to make contact with your suppliers, your customers, your staff and your management teams on a daily basis.
So, a fully functioning email system is at the core of your business – but maintaining that email system itself cannot and should not be considered a core business function in itself.
The complexity and expense of maintaining an email system in-house can be extremely challenging – especially for the SME. Nonetheless, IT is vital that IT is done properly, and so the question that many businesses face is, can we really afford to dedicate adequate resources to ensuring that IT is done properly?
For many businesses, the answer is no, and the intelligent strategy that is utilized in such instances is to outsource.
Outsourcing is of course something that many businesses do quite commonly for lots of their business functions. Things like web design, social media management, sales, PR and cleaning services are all regular occurrences. Email, on the other hand, is not always something that a business thinks about, but IT can be a real time and resource saver for those who decide to offload it.
The Benefits Of cloud based Email
The benefits of cloud based email are in fact numerous to a business. So let’s take a close look at exactly what they are.
1. Cost Savings
These can in fact be plentiful, as money can be saved in lots of places when outsourcing email. For instance, you won’t have to shoulder the cost of a dedicated server on your own, nor will you have to pay additional costs maintaining it, upgrading IT or paying for extra storage. Money spent on powering your own server will of course also be saved, as what you would spend on the cooling and backup needs of the equipment.
And of course you will also be making some hard savings on the administration costs of your staff who are tasked with running the server, its licenses, and managing all of the individual user accounts.
2. Reliability
The ongoing maintenance of in-house email servers is a full-time job. But, when you outsource to a dedicated hosting company, IT will be their full-time job, and, as such, will be much more experienced with what is required to do the job properly and efficiently.
If you look around, you will also see that many hosting companies like to boast of 99.9% uptime – and you probably wouldn’t be able to do that yourself in-house. You simply cannot afford for such a critical business function like your email to go down. Reliability and availability of the service is therefore paramount to the ongoing successful running of your business.
Security, too, will be an utmost priority for hosting companies – their business (not to mention the ones that they host) will depend on it, so you will be able to rest assured that your sensitive information that you exchange in your correspondences will be in safe hands.
3. Scalability
As your business grows (and grows and grows), you will have to scale up all of your IT infrastructure and resources accordingly. An email hosting service will normally work on a per-inbox per-month charging basis, and so, as you get bigger and have to take on more employees, you will be charged extra only as and when that happens – and there will be no limIT to just how big you can get.
4. Smarter Features
When outsourcing your email, your provider will offer you access to a whole range of advanced features that you can use to connect and engage with your customers on a much more personal level.
For example, you will normally be able to use custom fields for personalization, so that you will be able to adapt your emails to the various individuals on your list. You will also be able to segment your email lists into subsets, so you can send out focused emails to particular groups.
5. Upgrades
IT will be in a service provider’s interest to ensure that the servers that they are running are the latest models and the most up to date in the business, in order to fend off losing your subscription to a competitor. If you were to be continuously upgrading your hardware like this then you would be facing massive expenses.
So, if you move you email to a hosting service, then you will not only be able to reap the benefits of your email running on the latest and greatest servers, but you won’t have to shoulder the cost of IT either.
Are you thinking about outsourcing your email? Get in touch with us here at V&C Solutions to find out how we can help you make the transition.
