Emails are an integral part of business communication and are used to interact with your team, prospects, leads, and also customers. And at this point, there are billions of emails sent per day. So if anyone tells you that email is dead, they’re wrong. Emails are here to stay. 

Beyond outreach, emails are a way for customers to reach out to you if your phone lines are busy. Internally, they help you relay important updates, internal changes that you can’t communicate through chat.

It's not surprising that emails are an effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined. 

An illustration of how emails connect people An illustration of how emails connect people

Why? Because emails:

  • Are free
  • Promise good returns on investment
  • Stay in the recipient's inbox
  • Can have attachments like images and multimedia
  • Display all replies in one place
  • Are a non-invasive way to start an interaction with a prospect
  • Appeal for different requirements and scenarios
  • Can be automated
  • Leave behind a way for the recipient to respond

But you don’t need different email accounts to interact with your team and respond to your customers.

When it comes to keeping all your interactions in one place, a professional business email account is highly recommended. With a business email account, the emails you send look professional and credible.

For example, an email from jane.doe129e49838@gmail.com is more likely to hit the spam folder than one from jane.doe@businessname.com.

To get the best out of emails, you need to choose an email service that best matches your business requirements.

What is an email service?

An email service helps you send and receive emails. It collects and stores all your emails in your inbox, sent and archive folders, ensuring that none slips through the cracks. Once you sign up for an email service, you get your login credentials. You can use your login credentials on an email client to enter your email account and view your emails.

In short, the flow looks like this:

The flow of how to access your emails The flow of how to access your emails

So how does your current email service vary from an email client? 

The mail client is an application that you use to login into your email account and send, receive, and view your emails. Sometimes your email client and your email provider can be the same.  

For example, Gmail is an email service. You can use the Gmail app on your mobile device to access your emails. If you have an iPhone, you can use the phone’s native email client, the Mail app, to add your email account (Gmail for example) and log in. 

So how do they vary? Let’s take a look:

EMAIL PROVIDER
vs
EMAIL CLIENT

Runs the service, i.e the technical effort that goes behind sending your emails.

Lets you view your emails and respond to them.

Stores the emails you send and receive on its server.

Lets you download the emails from the email provider’s server to view them

Needs the internet to send and receive emails.

You can view previously downloaded emails offline.

Example: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook

Example: Mozilla Thunderbird, macOS Mail, Mailbird

How to choose the best email service for your team? 

Choosing the right email service helps you get the best features to facilitate your requirements. 

With a market that’s ripe with different email service providers, finding the right email service can be overwhelming. Not to mention the countless hours you spend on trials, research, and more.
We’ve compiled a list of email services that you can choose based on your needs. We also explore their best features and what makes them stand out from the rest. 

1. Gmail

Gmail is one of the most popularly used email services globally, with more than 1.8 billion users. Gmail is renowned for emails and also for the add-ons that make other forms of communication effortless.

Gmail
Owner

Google (USA)

Sending limit

Up to 2500 emails/day. 
Temporary suspension for 1-24 hours if you exceed the sending limit.

Pricing

Starts from $5 (USD)/ user

Cloud storage integration

Google Drive
Dropbox
One Drive

Collaboration

G-suite chat
Collaboration
Chat
Productivity tools

Recipients per message (CC)

Up to 2000

Aliases

Up to 30

Mailbox storage limit

30 GB

Email attachments

Up to 25 MB
Up to 10 GB through Google Drive

Other advantages

2. Outlook

The third most popular email service comes from Microsoft and has around 400 million users worldwide. With features that match Gmail’s offering, Outlook provides a familiar interface that Windows users prefer.

Outlook
Owner

Microsoft (USA)

Sending limit

Up to 300 emails/day

Pricing

Starts from $6.99 USD/ mailbox

Cloud storage integration

One Drive
Dropbox

Collaboration

Integration with Office 365 

Recipients per message (CC)

Up to 500

Aliases

Up to 10

Mailbox storage limit

15 GB

Email attachments

Up to 34 MB
Up to 2 GB through One Drive

Other advantages

 

3. Yahoo Mail

Previously a leading email service, but still holds a significant user base after Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail still challenges competitors by offering generous storage space and caters to small businesses with affordable plans. 

Yahoo Mail
Owner

Verizon (USA)

Sending limit

Up to 500 emails/day

Pricing

Starts from $1.19 USD/ mailbox

Cloud storage integration

Dropbox

Google Drive

Collaboration

Integration with:
- Facebook
- Flickr
- Calendar

Recipients per message (CC)

Up to 100

Aliases

Up to 30

Mailbox storage limit

1 TB

Email attachments

Up to 25 MB
Up to 150 MB through Dropbox

Other advantages

 

4. ProtonMail

Cyber attacks are a growing threat for businesses. Over 43% of the attacks target small businesses. Most of these businesses are not prepared to handle these attacks, with some eventually shutting down permanently. ProtonMail offers end-to-end encryption for your emails and superior encryption, making it one of the most secure email services. ProtonMail was developed by scientists from CERN and MIT.

ProtonMail
Owner

Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland)

Sending limit

Up to 1000 emails/ day
Sending more emails may result in a temporary suspension of 48 hours

Pricing

Starts from $8/ month/ user

Cloud storage integration

Proton Drive

Collaboration

Offers an in-built calendar to set up meetings

Recipients per message (CC)

Up to 10

Aliases

Up to 5 per user

Mailbox storage limit

Up to 5 GB per user

Email attachments

Up to 25 MB

Other advantages

 

5. Yandex.Mail

Yandex.Mail is a Russian email service that offers comprehensive email solutions for free. What sets Yandex apart is the free pricing and the storage it provides. Yandex.Mail has a friendly interface that lets you manage all domain settings effortlessly. 

Yandex.Mail
Owner

Yandex N.V. (Russian-Dutch)

Sending limit

Up to 500 emails/day

Pricing

Free

Cloud storage integration

Yandex.Disk

Collaboration

Yandex Connect offers:
- Storage
- Communication
- Wiki for collaboration

Recipients per message (CC)

Up to 50 

Aliases

Up to 10

Mailbox storage limit

Unlimited

Email attachments

Up to 30 MB totally

Up to 2 GB through Yandex.Disk

Other advantages

 

6. GMX Email

GMX is a German-based free email service that offers a robust suite of features for a complete email experience. Recently acquired by Mail.com, GMX promises a larger storage capacity and room for large attachments in your email. Apart from big promises, they also offer additional security like email encryption for confidential email communication. 

GMX Email
Owner

GMX Internet Services, Inc. (Germany)

Sending limit

Dynamically set 

Pricing

Free

Cloud storage integration

GMX Cloud

Collaboration

Access to:
- Online Office
- Organizer

Recipients per message (CC)

Up to 50 

Aliases

Up to 10

Mailbox storage limit

Up to 65 GB

Email attachments

Up to 50 MB

Other advantages

Why do you need a bulk email service?

By using a bulk email service, you can quickly scale your email campaign goals. Some of the best bulk email service providers simplify how you manage your subscriber list, automate the sending of mass emails, and more. Here are some of the benefits of using a bulk email service for your business.

Reach more prospects globally

As a business, you send emails to multiple customers at a given time for different purposes—to raise brand awareness, promote new offers and services, or relay important updates.

Email services cap the number of emails you send a day. This forces you to send emails from multiple inboxes. This makes it difficult to follow up, monitor responses, analyze performance, and more.

With a bulk email service in place, you can send emails to a global subscriber list with improved sending rates. Bulk email services automatically remove contacts who unsubscribe and avoid delivering emails to them, keeping your reputation intact. 

Optimize email for multiple devices

If you’re wondering, over 75% of Gmail users access their emails through their mobile devices. Clipped messages, trimmed subject lines, and un-optimized emails leave recipients with a bad impression.

 

Emails that aren’t optimized for different devices and screens easily get marked as spam. This threatens your reputation as a sender and brings down your credibility.

By optimizing your emails to display well on different devices, you improve the success of your email campaigns and ensure better conversion rates.

Collaborate with multiple teams

As a business owner, your sales and marketing teams are working on sending emails to your prospects and customers. But if they rely on an email inbox, they work without any collaboration, which will be a costly affair. Companies with sales and marketing teams not aligned are 2X more likely to experience a revenue decline.

 

When you look beyond an email service, you bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams. With transparent collaboration, you can offer your sales team a single unified view of a lead's interaction history. This ensures that your sales team spends their time going after leads that are promising.

Segment audience based on demographics and behavior

The secret formula to make your emails work is relevancy. Sending targeted emails with a catchy subject line and a pre-header text helps your email stand out in a crowded inbox. Sending engaging resources increases your chances of capturing your reader’s attention.

And how do we do it? That's right, Segmentation. With segmentation, you categorize contacts based on geo-location, age, gender, industry, interests. This helps you tailor variations of emails to appeal to different segments, emails that the contacts on your list want to read.

Cut down effort with email templates

A well-designed email helps you boost the response from your recipients. A visually captivating email makes it easy for you to grab the attention of your prospect and keep them engaged.

But you can’t risk your team creating unique emails one after the other. That’s where customizable email templates can help you. The templates are pre-built and reduce the need for extensive coding and designing. Your team members can pick these templates, customize and send them. 

Analyze email response with performance insights

Another limitation of an email service for teams is that it can hardly measure how your emails are performing. You may have to add external third-party widgets to measure vital email metrics. More widgets equal more time to handle the clutter.

Measuring the right metric can help you improve how you send your emails. It can help track when your prospect opened the email, the link they clicked, if they performed the goal and whether they unsubscribed. 

Tracking information like this helps you understand your prospects and customers better. It enables you to segment these contacts into relevant groups for nurturing and lets you send effective emails.
 

Power Up: Integrate your email service with your CRM software

Decrease the clutter of tools you need to add to your marketing and sales arsenal. Integrating your email service with a sales CRM like Freshsales helps you bring all your emails into one powerful hub.

So how can Freshsales help your business?

 

Freshsales is a full-fledged sales automation solution for sales teams. Freshsales empowers your sales team to attract quality leads, engage better through personalized conversations, drive deals with AI-powered insights, and nurture customer relationships. With the right tools and infrastructure, help your sales team to streamline their sales process and close more deals easily.

Reduce toggling between apps and keep all data in one place

With Freshsales’ email service integration, discover features that let you create and run your email campaigns all under one unified hub:

  • Enjoy 2-way sync between your email inbox and Freshworks CRM. Keep all your conversations, calendar meetings, and historical context in one place.
  • Auto Forward emails sent to your work inbox to the team inbox on Freshsales and turn email senders into contacts.
Email editor to design notification emails Email editor to design notification emails
Save time with pre-built email templates

When you rely on emails to take your business close to the target audience, speed and email sending limits are essential. Access to pre-built templates reduces time to create emails, and an increased email limit means you can reach a wider audience.

  • Do not let the email limits of your email service bring you down. Take control of your outbound campaigns from your sales CRM.
  • Create pre-formatted templates with placeholders that help you scale up your sales campaign for contact lists of different sizes.
Setting up a email notification journey for users Setting up a email notification journey for users
Keep personalization intact in every mail you send

Despite sending emails in bulk, addressing the recipient by the first name and adding cues about their interaction history makes the email look personalized. It shows that you care about the recipient and have invested time in getting to know them. With Freshsales, flavor your emails with personalization the easy way.

  • Set up sales sequences that automatically trigger an email when specific goals are met. For example, when your customers reach the end of a free trial, trigger a thank you email that persuades them to go premium.
  • Get real-time performance insights that let you optimize your email campaigns and increase click-through rates and conversions.
Setting up sales sequence in Freshsales Setting up sales sequence in Freshsales
Initiate delightful conversations and build a great relationship with customers

The emails you send must focus on opening a dialog between the prospect and your business. Freshsales lets you ensure that communication doesn't suffer and leads don't slip through the crack.

  • Automatically assign email replies to an available agent for quick resolution and close deals faster.
  • Empower your sales team with the complete history of your leads like their email engagement, previous interactions to help them personalize conversations and win customers for life.
Get a 360-degree view of your contacts in Freshsales Get a 360-degree view of your contacts in Freshsales

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