How long does it take you to deal with email management? Are you finding yourself buried under messages? Inbox a general dumping ground? Personal, business, and spam all one unholy mess??

If you have web hosting for your business there’s a simple way to cut the inbox clutter. But first, what’s your current system offering you?

The usual email management offerings

When you signed up for web hosting you almost undoubtedly got a free email address for your domain name. The hosting company will have supplied some sort of (web-based) email client software or you may be using something like Apple Mail or Outlook.

But just how good is that email client or software? Does it let you filter specific addresses? Sort things easily into folders? How much spam does your provider catch? What’s your storage limit? Can you create email templates for quick “fill-in-the-blank” messages? What about scheduling when messages are sent?

To be honest, most of the free tools that come with hosting accounts aren’t that great. But there is a pretty cheap alternative that can power up your email system and save you tons of time in the process.

Meet Google Workspace

Google Workspace is incredibly powerful in how it lets you manage your email quickly and efficiently. It uses all the cool features you get with a free Gmail account — but it uses your own business domain name, which looks so much more professional than me@gmail.com. Google Workspace isn’t free — but then again, how much is your time worth? 

The basic plan starts at $6 USD, per month, per individual unique user. Each individual user has their own personal login and password, email address in the form of username@domainname.com which uses Google’s spam filters. Each user also gets a personal Google Drive and Google Calendar and access to a host of other tools and apps.

Setting up your Google workspace email to use your domain name is pretty simple. Here’s short video to walk you through it.

Setting up Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)

Even if you’re a team of one in your business, Google Workplace can be a good investment. Why?

The power of aliases

Google workspace allows you to create email aliases. An email alias is an email address that looks different to the user’s main email address but functionally IS the same address. For example, let’s say your main email is me@professional_dogtrainer.com.  

And let’s say you’d rather not have your personal email on your website contact form. You could set up an alias email:  contact@professional_dogtrainer.com which would send all email from your contact form direct to your me@professional_dogtrainer.com inbox.

Why else might you want to do something like that? Well, you can have up to 100 aliases per user.  And you can filter and sort emails by alias.  

So, let’s say you want a quick way to sort out emails about new inquiries. If you’ve created an alias contact@professional_dogtrainer.com as above, you can now filter all those specific messages and put them in their own folder.

You could do the same thing for different services you offer: 

training@professional_dogtrainer.com

boarding@professional_dogtrainer.com

classes@professional_dogtrainer.com

Or different admin tasks

invoices@professional_dogtrainer.com

events@professional_dogtrainer.com

This means you don’t have to wade through the 700 messages in your inbox to check the ones you need.

Aliases for teams

You might be thinking “Wow! I have an admin assistant and 7 trainers on my team — that would cost me a fortune!” Fear not! Aliases can help you out there as well.

Rather than setting up individual user accounts for each of your trainers, set up a unique ‘Training’ account to give you a training@professional_dogtrainer.com email address. Next, in that user account create an alias for each of your trainers. For example:

billy@professional_dogtrainer.com

ethyl@professional_dogtrainer.com

You then give the ‘Training’ account login details to each of your trainers. All your trainers can now access every email in the ‘Trainers’ inbox if necessary, but you’d also set up individual folders for each trainer and filter ‘their’ messages into ‘their’ inbox folder.  

That way all trainers can deal with ‘Training’ emails as required but each trainer can also check their own emails without having to wade through all the training related messages your company has received. 

Again, Google has made adding users and aliases pretty easy. Here’s a short video to walk you through the process.

Google Workspace: Adding Additional Email Addresses

Time is literally money

In today’s fast-paced, internet-based world, a business — even a small business — needs all the help it can get to stay on top of email management. Long gone are the days of clearing your inbox in a few minutes once a day! 

Given that most small business owners spend hours dealing with their inbox, anything that helps keep things simple and sorted has got to be worth serious consideration. Google Workspace might just be the answer you’ve been looking for.