Create a Professional Small Business Email System With Gmail

A lot of small businesses have generic web hosting with email addresses that simply forward to a personal email account. This gets the job done but is very unprofessional. If a customer sends an email to billing and your reply is from your Yahoo! email account, the customer will see that you are a small-time operation without any infrastructure and will immediately lose faith in your business. I am about to show you how you can use the powerful features of Gmail to manage all of these email addresses from a single Gmail account, how to use Filters and Labels to organize all of this incoming mail, and how to respond to each of these emails while automatically replying with the correct name and email address.

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Just to clarify, here are the problems we need to address:

• Your web server doesn't have a good email system in place. Your server either forwards email from each account (webmaster, billing, support) to your personal email account at Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, etc., OR you manage your mail on your web server through Squirrel Mail or some other generic mail system which is a pain to deal with.
• Your customers can send mail to your different addresses but since you forward that mail to your personal account your reply messages look unprofessional, OR if you use Squirrel Mail you have to log in to several email accounts to check all of your company's emails.

This is what we are going to accomplish:

• Save time checking and responding to emails by consolidating all emails into a single Gmail account.
• Create Gmail Labels so incoming mail to can be quickly identified by which account it was sent to.
• Create Gmail Filters so incoming messages get the proper Labels applied to them.
• Change the Gmail settings so when you reply to each email, the From field will automatically be populated with the name and email address you want your customers to see (instead of your personal Gmail account).

1.  Create your Gmail account

Tutorial Screenshots

You need to create a Gmail account if you don't already have one. It's free and relatively painless to set up. Go to  Gmail.com and click Sign up for GMail.

2.  Redirect email accounts to your Gmail account

If you have generic hosting like SiteGround , GoDaddy , Bluehost or any other host with CPanel installed, login to your CPanel. Click on Forwarders under the Mail section. Click Add Forwarder and enter your Address to Forward and Forward to email address. Click Add Forwarder.  Repeat for as many different accounts as you'd like to manage from Gmail.

If you have private hosting, don't have CPanel or don't know how to forward email addresses on your server, contact your hosting provider or IT guy.

3.  Create new accounts in Gmail for each email address

Login to Gmail and click on Settings at the top right of the page. Then click on the Accounts tab. Now click Add another email address. You'll get a popup window where you'll need to enter a name and email address. Enter the email address that is being forwarded to this Gmail account, and the name you want people to see when you reply from this email. If it is the sales email, you may want to keep your name or use something generic like Sales. Set it to whatever you want your customers to see.

Next you'll have to verify that you are the owner of that email address. Click Send Verification to have Gmail send a verification code. This will be easy to verify because the message will be forwarded from your web server to your Gmail account. Close the popup window (don't worry about the verification code). Go back to your inbox to read the verification email. If it hasn't appeared, keep clicking on Inbox until it shows up. Open the email and click the verification link, which will take you to a confirmation page. Close the page and return to your Gmail inbox. You can double check your account settings to make sure the email account was verified by going to Settings and clicking the Accounts tab.

Repeat this process for each email you are forwarding in.

4.  Create a Label for each email address

Gmail doesn't allow you to create folders for your email. Instead it allows you to create Labels that you can tag each email message with. Labels act like folders but with the added functionality that multiple labels can be added to a single message. This may sound complicated, but as soon as you see how they work you will like them.

Go back to Settings and click on the Labels tab. Create a new Label for each email address you are forwarding in. Then go back to your inbox. On the left side of the screen you'll see a section called Labels. To the right of each Label is a downward-facing arrow. Click on each arrow to set a color for each Label. This will help you easily identify each message in your inbox according to which email account it was sent to.

At this time you should also click on the title of each Label in the Labels section to see how they work. They act as a folder, and change your inbox to only show messages with that Label.

5.  Create Filters to automatically add Labels to messages

Now we need to create some Filters. A Filter is a process to be run every time Gmail receives a new message. We want to create Filters to add the proper Label to each message.

Go to Settings again and click on the Filters tab. Click Create a new filter. In the To field, enter the full email address of the email being forwarded to the Gmail account and click Next Step. Check the checkbox titled Apply the label: and choose the correct Label from the drop down box. Then click Create Filter.

Repeat this process for each email you are forwarding in.

6.  Set Gmail to reply with the correct email address

This is a very important step, don't skip it! By default, every time you reply to a message, regardless of which email address it was sent to, Gmail will respond with your default name and email address. We can't have this if we want to look professional. We need to set Gmail to use the email address that the message was sent to (this will also set Gmail to respond with the name we saved with each email account).

Go back to Settings and click the Accounts tab. Look for this line:

When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses:

Now make sure you choose this option:

Reply from the same address the message was sent to

Your settings will be saved automatically as soon as you change your selection. 

7.  Test everything out

You need to test your new email system to make sure everything works correctly. YOU CANNOT SEND TEST EMAILS FROM GMAIL, YOU NEED TO SEND TEST EMAILS FROM A 3RD PARTY EMAIL SYSTEM. Open up Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, another Gmail account, or any other place you can send and receive emails. Send an email to each one of the email addresses you just created. In your Gmail account, double check that:

• All messages are properly forwarded to your Gmail account
• All messages automatically get the correct Labels applied to them

Now respond to each message in Gmail. Double check that:

• The correct name and email address is automatically set in your From section in Gmail
• The correct name and email address is displayed in the replied message in your Hotmail/Yahoo! mail/other email account. This is important because this is exactly what your customers will see when you reply to their emails.

Congratulations! You've just created a slick email system for your small business website and you didn't have to hire IT guys or purchase any new software. You can now manage your entire email system from a single Gmail account and you will appear to be a larger corporate company even if you are a one man business!

A couple of useful tips

• You may want to forward emails to your Gmail account from more than one website. To keep your Gmail inbox simple you may want to add one Label to all messages sent to any email address from a single domain. To do this simply create a Label for the domain. Then create a Filter to add the Label to these messages. Instead of specifying several email accounts from the domain, just enter *@ yourwebsitename.com. The * character acts as a wildcard, and all email addresses from that domain will get the Label you specify.
• You can create more Filters to add more than one Label to messages. This can be nice because you'll have more Labels and more options to narrow down the messages in a single view.
• You could also use this system to make your business look much larger than it actually is. While I cannot condone the ethics behind this, you may want your customers to think there are more employees in your Sales or Support teams. You could create email addresses for support_ben@ yourwebsitename.com, support_nick@ yourwebsite.com, etc. and create more admin accounts on your website using these email addresses and different names. You could respond to support tickets or in your support forums from these different support email addresses. Customers might feel more comfortable with your products or with your company if they think you have a larger staff ready to take care of support for them.

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