Over 50 percent of businesses report a 32 times ROI on their spendings on email marketing.
Another report states that there'll be 5.7 billion active emails by the end of 2019. Also, more and more small and medium businesses are depending on emails for their marketing.
Eighty percent of SMEs depend on the channel for acquisition, while 81 percent use if for customer retention strategies.
Even more: 99 percent of consumers check their emails daily. And 50 percent of people say it's their most preferred channel for information from brands.
What all the above means is obvious:
You cannot afford to use inefficient tools for your email marketing and business management.
In this article, we'll show the top 5 best options for your email marketing and business needs.
Top 5: Business Email Providers Review
Product Image & Rating (Out Of 10) | Product Name | Contact |
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Zoho Mail is one of the productivity tools offered by the Zoho Group. The mail service, however, is a full-featured stand-alone email solution for small and large businesses alike.
The Zoho email solution provides numerous features out of the box for users.
They also offer excellent uptime as their servers are available 99 percent of the time. Their email security is on par with industry standards. You can rest assured your privacy is guaranteed.
The tool offers a free custom mail addresses for teams of up to five members.
Their control panel also allows you to tweak just about any setting to customize your mail. This means your mail system is unique to your business needs.
What Makes Zoho Mail Stand Out
Their free custom domain name is one of the best perks of using the software. Startups and small businesses alike looking for an inexpensive email provider service can leverage this offering.
Another remarkable feature is its mobile application. The app is available on both iOS and Android platforms, respectively.
What Needs Improvement in Zoho Mail
Zoho mail is one of the many arms of the Zoho productivity suite. The drawback, however, is the poor integration with other third-party tools. This constrains you to options available in their suite.
Another quirk is the customization options. Due to the numerous setup configurations available, the initial setup process can be cumbersome.
Pricing
Zoho is offered on a tiered basis
Free Plan
You get a custom domain name and 5GB of space for up to 5 users on your team. It is restricted to web access, however. It starts at $1.
Mail Lite
In this plan, you get up to 5GB/user as well as full access on both web and mobile. You also have calendar, email recall, and task scheduling features. It starts at $2.
Mail Premium
You get everything in Mail Lite. Other features include support for up to 250MB attachment, 50GB per user, and Resource booking on the calendar. It starts at $3.
Workplace
You get everything in premium plus in addition to a full productivity suite too. It starts at $3.
Pros
Cons
Fastmail offers robust email suite that combines your calendar, contacts, and email in one place for a seamless experience.
The company prides itself on the respect of customer data and privacy. They offer their email services as an extension to other productivity apps too.
Their email services are both full-featured and intuitive. Even if you need to migrate from another service, their import tool makes this process seamless.
They also provide mobile desktop and web apps for users to access email on their platform.
What Makes FastMail Stand Out
Fastmail offers secure and private emails for businesses that prioritize their customer data. This ensures that your privacy and that of your business is put before anything else. Their flexibility of access on any platform is another huge advantage.
The simplicity of design and configuration is another huge plus.
What Needs Improvement
Aside from the 30-day free trial, there are not free services available on FastMail. Hence, only paying users can leverage the platform.
In addition to this limit, the lowest tier available does not let you operate a custom domain email.
All these mean the first tier is with minimal features and hence unusable for many small businesses.
Pricing
Fastmail is offered on a tiered basis:
Basic
In this plan, you get 2GB of storage per user, full-featured calendar and contact tools and expert support. It costs $3 per user each month.
Standard
This plan offers 25GB per user per month and a custom domain email in addition to all features in the basic plan. It costs $5 per user each month.
Professional
This plan offers all the features of the standard plan. You also get 100GB per user and numerous administrator control. It costs $9 per user each month.
Pros
Cons
Proton Mail is a secure email solution that leverages encryption to hide your data from hackers. The software tool was developed by MIT scientists and engineers to help protect businesses and individuals from privacy breaches.
The team is based in Switzerland hence offering some of the best privacy protection laws to all customers of the email services.
The email service is also community-backed; hence, you can b assured that there are no backdoors for the company to access your data.
What Makes Proton Mail Stand Out
The security features of proton mail are arguably the best in the industry.
The company uses open source cryptographic libraries to secure all emails hence ensuring all exploits are noticed and blocked in real-time. You also have the option of sending self-destruct emails.
Your privacy is assured as even Proton Mail engineers can not read your data.
What Needs Improvement
Proton mail focuses on functionality and security hence leaving some of the perks of email services lacking. The user interface is bland and uninspiring, and navigation through the tool can be unintuitive.
Also, the free version offers minimal features to be useful.
Pricing
Below is a breakdown of Proton Mail's pricing:
Free
In this plan, you can register only one account and send out a total of 150 messages a day. Storage is capped to 500MB.
Plus
You get 5GB space, 1000 messages per day a custom domain name and provision for five email addresses. It costs $5 per month.
Professional
This provides 5GB space per user and can hold up to 50,000 users on the account. There are no caps on messages nor labels, and you get two custom domain emails. It costs $8/month per user.
Visionary
Provisions 20GB per user and can hold six users. There are no caps on messages, and you get up to 10 custom domain emails. It costs $30/month per user.
Pros
Cons
This is the email service offered by Google for businesses and individuals alike. The tool provides access to all google cloud office tools as well as a robust email solution.
In addition to the email service, Google offers additional tools such as the admin control panel and a mobile app. These ensure that you can monitor your email services on the go.
The tool comes with support for Google calendars and syncs your contacts from all your devices. You can use the video conferencing tools for business meetings and ample cloud storage for files and documents.
What Makes G-Suite Stand Out
Unlike most other services, the G-suite is designed to sync all your activities across all your devices. This is important as all your emails are delivered to you in real-time no matter where you are signed in.
Its integration with other Google Office tools like Docs and Sheets makes swapping from business to email a breeze.
Also, the robust contact management and cloud storage features are a huge advantage.
What Needs Improvement
Some of the features of the G-Suite load slowly, especially when moving from email to Docs. This lag is insignificant but noticeable.
The customer service is also quite slow to respond.
You can, however, look online for solutions for your problem as their community is very active.
Pricing
G-Suite pricing is outlined below:
Basic
This plan costs $6. It comes with free access to Docs Sheets and Slides. You also get 30GB of cloud storage for your email and files.
Business
This plan costs $12. In addition to the features of the basic plan, you get access to priority support, unlimited cloud storage as well as admin and audit tools.
Enterprise
This plan costs $25 a month per user. It contains all the features of the Business plan. It also extends beyond to include reporting tools, alert and security centers as well as cloud identity.
Pros
Cons
The Office 365 email suite is one of the most popular in the market today. Microsoft offers this email solution for businesses, students, and simple users alike. The tool bundles the Microsoft office tools and offers them to registered users for a fee.
These office tools are not limited to your desktop computer use. You can access them from any location as they live on cloud servers.
Given the reach of Microsoft across the globe, Office 365 is accessible in almost all locations.
It also comes with multi-language support for different regions to collaborate effectively.
The email solution also comes pre-configured to integrate with numerous third-party solutions such as Salesforce CRM.
What Makes Office 365 Stand Out
Excellent multi-language support for businesses that operate around the globe is one of the top features of the tool.
The ease with which it integrates with other top third-party tools also makes it suitable as an email solution for many businesses.
The tool also seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft tools like Excel and Word> This significantly makes transitioning from email to work smooth.
What Needs Improvement
The vast possibilities that the tool offers can be overwhelming even for experienced users. The documentation is very detailed but is not very organized. Usually, you should be okay running a search on your problem as there's a ton of information available from the robust community.
Pricing is also steep.
Pricing
The email solution Ois offered under two broad tiers
Home
Business
Pros
Cons
Top Pick
All the other solutions are excellent in their own right. But only Zoho combines its features such that it is useful to both the bootstrapper and enterprise organizations equally.
Zoho Mail offers free custom domain names for their free tier and provides an excellent price to value ratio for the other plans.
The security offered is one of the best in the industry, and the customizations available are quite handy for businesses looking to automate most email processes.
The integration with other premium tools in the Zoho productivity suite makes it an excellent tool for your business email needs.
Business Email Providers Features and Their Functions
If you want to make a detailed comparison between email solutions, here's some help. The following points highlight critical features you should look out for in an email solution.
Scheduled Delivery
A robust email solution should allow you to schedule emails and responses to be delivered after a delayed period or at a scheduled time set by you.
Formatting and Organisation
It should support conditional formatting of your mail trail in custom order so you can find relevant information at a glance.
Grouping and Labels
It must support the ability to organize related emails and conversations into a folder or label for easy access.
Settings Feature
It must provide a means for you to customize your email handling and processing strategy to boost your productivity.
Alert and Notifications
The service must support configurations of alerts and customization of notifications when new emails arrive, or new schedules are due.
Templates
The solution must have a good number of email templates for different purposes.
Mail Export
It must support exporting emails offline or to some cloud storage for future access and use.
Access Control and Delegation
Your email service must provide configurations that allow you to control access to your inbox and also to delegate your inbox management to someone else.
Final Verdict
In summary, an email service is both a marketing tool as it is a productivity solution. Choosing the right answer, of course, depends on your particular use case. But in many cases, these five solutions will be more than enough for your needs.
I'm sure you already know which solution is right for you, so go on and get started on your email management journey.
