Email tools are abundant and nowadays, everybody seems to be retrofitted with a gigantic mailbox that will probably never be filled up. Expensive tools are not always the best option for your business, because they often come equipped with functions that, in my opinion, will probably never be used. Let’s imagine a scenario in which someone starts a business that grows and grows. Eventually, that person grows up, gets married, and recruits his family members to his business team. In this scenario, an email structure that started as a one-man band could be different from one used for a family-owned business.

With a one-man team, one person wears the hat that says “I am the sales+marketing+operation+whatever.” It’s true that an email structure can be set up to reflect each of the job titles that this single person holds; however, it’s probably too complicated for that person to handle info@, sales@, marketing@, and service@. He’ll probably end up deciding, “I’ll just use my private email for everything: john.doe@yahoo.com.”

This is probably the best idea in this situation, because at this stage of the game, your business will take the form of that one person’s identity, and building a business upon that personal identity is a smart way to attract more customers.

Using a personal email to conduct business usually means several things:
1. I am in stealthy mode now and not ready to reveal my business identity yet.
2. I am a super neat person: business is business, personal is personal.
3. I want to add a personal touch to the communication process.
4. My business just started and I haven’t had time to get my email personalized.

Regardless of what others think, if you find using a private email address more convenient, then stick to it. Because oftentimes, you can’t be sure of what’s going to happen to your business, so why not spend less time worrying about the email structure and more time on the market? Hopefully your business grows and survives the recession, and if you’re lucky enough, you will find your family teaming up with you to keep your business growing.

Now “1+1=2″right? Well, not in the case of number of email inboxes.

Let’s say you have two-person team now, and you’ve equally divided the responsibility between marketing, sales, service, and so on. Your business has matured and you want to add some professional touches to your email system, and this leads to a bunch of different email inboxes. Now you’ll have to take care of managing all these inboxes, and communicating between service, leads projects, etc. Until now, the one-to-one relationship that existed in the one-person stage just got multiplied, not only by the amount of mailboxes, but also by the amount of information transferred. And, now your relatives want to join your business team because they take your high number of email addresses to mean your business has become more successful. “1+1+n=…???”

You get the picture.

So, how do you know what your current needs are in terms of email? Well, you don’t know. But your customers know. Adding email structure is all about dissecting the information to target customers and market. If you think creating different mailboxes will help you create better customer service and better communication, then do it. If you have a genius way of managing the amount of emails in that one super
box and still can keep up, stick to it. You see, the essence of creating email structure is not just to receive emails and find a place to store them; creating email structure has to, in the meantime, create value for your business in term of better customer service, campaign marketing, or sales. If it weren’t for the reasons of bettering your business, the email structure is an huge load to maintain, upgrade, and sustain.

To build a private label (own domain) email system requires knowledge of the domain name server, mail exchange, and also knowledge on IMAP or POP3. And on top of this, controlling spam will also be needed to keep the bad worms out of your sensitive data. This is no easy task for small businesses, let alone for entrepreneurs completely out of the IT arena.

Before diving into the pool, you need to define your email needs, at least for now:
1. Ask yourself how important a private label email is to your customer. For a PR business that polishes relations for others, you definitely will need that personalized and feel.
2. Assess how do you want to control spam. If you do post regularly at forum or SNS, you could very well be worried about the amount of spam you will receive from that email. (Here’s a tip: Get a dedicated email address for sign up and another email for conducting business.)
3. Do you need to send campaign emails out? If you do send out emails in large volumes, it’s wise to get a paid email marketing system like iContact, because you don’t want to have your email address listed as a spammer. Besides, there are new rules now regarding how to send out mass emails.
4. Web or desktop. Web email is very convenient, but many desktop applications will still need email clients to operate, i.e. endicia. In most cases, businesses will need both.
5. Define the flow requirements for customer service, sales, marketing and shipping. Usually, you will just
need this group inbox for small businesses. Ask yourself: “How can the email information be routed or assigned to the best flow that will benefit both the customer and the teams?” You may want to forward some inboxes to others to simplify the flow.
6. Understand that email systems need to grow with your business. Here’s one example: After implementing our very own CRM system, we switched from Outlook to Thunderbird so we could make better use of the
many open source plugins that Outlook lacks.