Why Your @aol.com Email Address is Professional Suicide

So you run a business.

It’s important that people love your product and services.

You want them to have the very best experience possible so they can spread the good word throughout the business community.

But there’s just one problem.  You’re using an AOL email address.

Join us May 17th, 2010 at 4:30pm Pacific/7:30pm Eastern for AskAdria Live where we will discuss this and you can join in the conversation via chat

Whether you know it or not, AOL is causing a ton of problems including:

• Your inbox is overflowing with spam advertisements for Rolex watches, Viagra and Mortgage refinanacing
• You have trouble finding emails from your customers
• It’s not easy to read your email on your iPhone or Blackberry

Plus, let’s face it, when people look at your business card and see fwendal308@aol.com, it doesn’t say, “Professional Lawyer who can handle a large account”.

Today we’ll explore the challenges and opportunities of business owners when it comes to email:

• Spam management
• Email solutions for business
• Business vs Personal email solutions
• Email workflow options
• Managing file attachments
• Next steps to get your email under control

Spam Management

See the recent article on spam control I wrote up on my blog at ButYoureAGirl.com

6 Email Workflows

Now while email is an important part of business, it doesn’t mean that everything can be solved within email.  If you imagine that email is the hammer, then every task can look like nail but often, there are more effective tools out there.  Here are a few examples:

1. Manage leads – CRM instead of email
   Salesforce, Highrise
2. Problem – Ticketing system instead of email
   Zendesk
3. Project – Project management software instead of email
   Basecamp
4. Ecommerce – shopping cart instead of email
   Volusion
5. Calendar – Calendaring software instead of email
   Google Calendar, Timebridge
6. News – RSS/Blog/Mailing list instead of email
   Google Reader, WordPress, Mailchimp

Moving Your Email

Now that you’ve made the decision, how do you leave?  One of the first steps is to understand what you’re working with.  Just like weight loss, you need to know what you weigh and create a goal.  With email, the important things are:

• How many emails do you currently have
• How much space do they take up
• Do you use your email system to also manage your contacts?
  If so, how many contacts do you have?
• Do you manage an electronic calendar?
  If so, how many appointments do you have and how many appointments would you need to transfer?

When I start Google Apps migrations for people, these are the very first questions.  From there we discuss what their other needs are like checking their email on the road, email management and multiple accounts for other staff.

A very powerful tool I’ve discovered for moving email is called YippieMove.  It allows you to quickly and easily transfer email from one server to another.  They can transfer email from hundreds of different providers including AOL, Yahoo, GoDaddy, Gmail, 1&1 Mail and nearly 100 university email accounts.  Remember, some providers don’t offer IMAP (hosted email) for free so you may need to pay  before you could do a transfer.  I’ve used this to transfer email from hosting accounts on cPanel at Bluehost, moving the email into  a Google Apps account.

If you have questions or would like to get connected with someone to help your company with an email migration, my contact info is posted or you can email me at adria@askadria.com

From The Chat