4 Reasons Gmail Is Every Startup’s Best Friend

So, you’ve launched your business. Congratulations! You are officially an entrepreneur, a small business owner, the head of the hottest new startup. Now that you’ve gotten your company off the ground, it’s time to get your name out there. Email is an essential part of virtually every business’s marketing and communications strategy, but for small businesses and startups getting email right is particularly important. By choosing Gmail to meet your company’s marketing and communications goals, you are doing yourself a big favor.

Here are our top 4 reasons why Gmail is an invaluable tool for startups and small business owners:

Quickly and easily personalize emails to gain a competitive edge
The price is right for tight startup budgets
Labels make organization a breeze
Security you can trust is built right into the platform

When you use Gmail to personalize your messages to fit the interests of each unique customer, your startup gains an edge over the competition.

1. Personalizing emails is important, and Gmail makes it easy.

It’s one of the oldest business tricks in the book: when you want to build rapport with someone, you should mention their name in conversation. Research shows again and again that the same principle holds for e-business as well. Whether you find an innovative way to personalize your marketing emails, your content, or your product to your customers, personalization is sure to give your company a boost.

Personalizing emails might sound tricky, but when you use Gmail, it doesn’t have to be! Taking advantage of powerful email personalization tools is as simple as downloading an app from the Chrome web store. Some options, like the tool linked above, even offer a variety of benefits beyond personalization as well, such as:

Mail merge support
Scheduling
Click tracking
Integration with other tools, like Google Sheets

Gmail offers all of the tools your startup or small business needs to be successful for an affordable price.

2. Get all the email features you need without breaking the bank.

For small businesses and startups, every penny of your budget counts. There’s no reason to sink a small fortune into expensive email platforms or software when you can take advantage of Google’s professional tools, which include plenty of professional email features for Gmail, for a fraction of the price. Google’s suite of professional tools, G Suite, starts at just $5 per month, or the price of a cup of coffee. If you up your spending to $10 a month, you get access to unlimited storage and Vault, a secure data archiving service.

When you boost your gmail experience by purchasing G Suite, you get access to essential features and customization options like:

24/7 support from G Suite’s email experts
The ability to switch the Google Logo for your brand’s logo in your email browser
Custom domain name
Seamless integration between Google applications like Google Docs, Google Hangouts, and Google Calendar

Organization is essential to business success, and Gmail makes organizing your inbox easy.

3. Keep all of your communications organized.

As the owner of a startup or small business, how many emails do you get every day? For many companies, the answer is dozens, if not hundreds. You have to manage communications between employees, marketing efforts, customer support, vendor relationships, and countless other messages. All of those emails can quickly turn your inbox into a mess– think the electronic version of the desk in a college student’s dorm.

Keeping your startup organized is essential to its success, and an unorganized mailbox simply won’t do if you want to stay on top of your communications. Luckily, Gmail’s convenient label feature makes it easy to keep all of your communications nice and organized. The labels feature allows you to clean up your inbox by:

Automatically adding personalized labels to incoming messages
Assigning custom labels to outgoing messages
Using labels to manage which emails show up on each of your devices (say goodbye to the overcrowded inbox on your phone!)

When you take advantage of Gmail’s built-in security features, you will never have to wonder if your company’s inbox is protected again.

4. Rest assured that your emails are safe and secure.

Every business– big, small, old, or new– should have security at the top of its priority list. There are plenty of ways to improve a startup’s cybersecurity, but one of the easiest and simplest ways to defend against attack is to simply choose secure software to begin with.

From a security standpoint, Gmail is an excellent option for safe email management. Gmail’s secure HTTPS connection is always on, which means nobody can ever snoop through your sensitive business emails when you are connected to wifi. Additionally, Gmail encrypts your emails before storing them on its servers, further preventing them from cyber attack. Google has also recently rolled out more extensive security features for its email platform, including:

Confidential mode, which allows you to create expiration dates for messages containing sensitive information
Phishing protections to address Business Email Compromise (BEC) threats
Information Rights Management tools that allow you to control whether recipients have the option of copying, downloading, printing, or forwarding your emails
Redesigned security warnings that make it easier to understand exactly what is going on with your company’s email security

Finding the right marketing and communications tools to power your startup can be tricky, but when it comes to choosing an email platform the choice is simple. Gmail offers all of the email features a small business or startup could need to expand its reach and accelerate its growth, making it a great option for entrepreneurs.

BY MELISSA PALLOTTI

Melissa Pallotti is a professional writer, computer geek, and hockey fan based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can connect with her on Twitter @wishlissa or via LinkedIn.