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Believe it or not, lots of small business owners do not understand how to tap the power email. Fax machines and telephone calls are very much the primary communications tools for lots of small businesses. Effective use of email can be a great tool for improving small business management.
Read more about small business management using email

Ive worked with a lot of small business owners that have email addresses but do not use them effectively. Understanding that a lot of small business owners are Pro’s at their business ( i.e. roofing) first and the operations and management of that business is a second talent. First I have to say that this client admitted to not having much technical background and had been using another IT company that they trusted and frankly, they were burned by them.

Problems

For example, this client had an email address that was provided by their ISP. I might add that this was a dial-up account (this was 6 months ago), so that gives you an idea of where this client was technically. They were doing all of their communications with faxes and phone calls. This particular business provides several quotes a day. The quotes are on a 3 page template which were created by an application the client used. It takes him about 20 minutes to prepare each one. It takes another 15 minutes on average to fax it to the client. If he has to contact the customer by phone its about 30 minutes on average (phone calls are long because people usually ask lots of questions when communicating by phone). These are all averages and take into account, wrong fax and phone numbers, busy signals, backlog of faxes and phone calls, and questions from customers. The average transmission was around 35 minutes. Thats a lot of time spent on the phone and making trips to and from the fax machine.

The email address contained the company name which was good (i.e. company name@anyisp.net). However, there were several problems, some technical and others were simply due to the business owner not knowing how to use the an email address effectively. The client had 6 networked PC’s. All had been configured to use the dial-up account to send and receive email via Microsoft Outlook.

If you’ve ever used email with a dial-up account, you know this is a nightmare (i.e. very slow particularly when sending and receiving attachments) especially when running a business. What makes this even worse is that this client also had an existing high speed internet account with another ISP but the last IT company decided to set up the email with the dial-up account.

Also important to note is that the client did not know the username or passwords for the dial-up account and had never setup the email for the high speed account. The last bit of the puzzle was that this client also had a partial website, that the ISP was supposed to be building for 6 months which was in shambles, and webhosting with yet a 3rd email account which was not being used.

This client was a classic case of why some small business owners never get involved with technology. They’re afraid they will end up in this very type of situation. They had been railroaded by some IT company, by no fault of their own, who set there email up using a dial-up account and by a large ISP that never finished their website.

Solution to the problems

Since there were an array of problems. We first recommended to the client that we implement a scheduled plan that he was comfortable with, so that the changes would have minimal impact on his business operations.

Since we were also rebuilding the website for the client and providing hosting, we recommended that the customer cancel the dial-up account and use the domain mail that came along with the web hosting the we were provided to them. This one step saved the client a monthly service charge of around $20 and got rid of a non branded email address in exchange for a branded email address. Branded email is very important for small business owners.

We set the client up so that all of the PC’s were using the High Speed internet access and Microsoft Outlook. We placed the new primary email address on all of the PC’s. The primary email address should be one the encompasses the entire company (i.e. managment@companyname.com). Read tips on choosing an domain name here.

Advanced setup -

• You can send and receive emails on one or multiple computers as long as they are configured to your new email address. You will likely have web access via an online interface (i.e. hotmail, gmail) from any where in the world where there is an Internet connection. If you have employees than it may be a good idea to have one primary email address that’s provided to your customers so that you and your employees are seeing the same emails. Additionally, if your website is configured to allows customers to send you emails, this primary email address would also capture those. Later, individual employee email addresses could be setup to respond to emails once you assign them to specific employees. The end result is a process that captures all of the businesses emails in the same mailbox. This is great process for tracking and keeping a single record of all emails.
• Email on your cell phone – Some cell phone services allow you to access your email with your cell phone. If you want this option make sure your cell service provider and cell phone are compatible with the POP3 email for the domain you registered and NOT another email account from the cell company which they will likely offer you.

After implementing only a few of the steps in this article our client now raves that he has easily re-gained about 30% of his time per day by simply using email to send his quotes to his customers. Phone calls and faxes are still used but emails are now his first choice and he is branding every time he uses it.