7 Benefits Of Using An Email Forwarding Service

Email forwarding services are currently one of the hottest topics in the business world. Some firms are testifying how email forwarding has helped them gain more clients, while others are talking about how it’s making their jobs easier. Unfortunately, you’ll also find negative feedback, so it’s difficult to make a conclusion.

Perhaps, you can only really know the worth of an email forwarding service by trying it out yourself, but this service is not free. You at least need to have a general understanding of what email forwarding service is, and that’s what this article is all about. This guide aims to help you understand how an email forwarding service works and its potential benefits to you or your business.

How Does An Email Forwarding Service Work?

Guides regarding email forwarding often bombard you with a lot of technical lingo you’re not aware of. Although understanding how email forwarding works fully requires you to at least know these terms, that’s not always the case.

In simplest terms, email forwarding is a process of redirecting the route of an email from one address to another. For example, your primary address is one@outlook.com and you have four extras. Email forwarding is basically rerouting all the emails that were supposed to go to your four extra addresses and compiling them into one@outlook.com–you get the idea.

At one glance, the concept seems to be far too simple to have any significant effect, but there are actually a lot of benefits to using an email forwarding service, especially now with all the changes within the email forwarding practice. But, as usual, there are skeptics, especially when it comes to safety. One of the most popular myths talks about how an email with malware can spread to other addresses when you implement email forwarding. Although this has some truth in it, you can avoid such an issue by opting for a secure email forwarding platform, a great example of which is ForwardMX.

Either way, regardless of the risks, you can’t deny the fact that you can get something out of email forwarding services. Here are seven of those benefits:

1. Automation

Perhaps, the best benefit that you can get from an email forwarding service is the automation.

As you already know, when someone joins your mailing list, the first thing you have to do is send them a message so you can keep them engaged in your business. While most of them will ignore the message, some will send a reply if they’re interested.

Seeing how they’re prospects who are most likely to be customers, you have to rope them in. Now, the problem is they may send the reply when you’re on a break. Once you come back, they most likely have lost interest in your business. That’s when email forwarding comes in.

With an email forwarding service, you can set up a message that will be sent automatically to any address that sends an email to your business address. A good auto reply email includes:

A message saying you’ll be back soon
An estimate of when you’ll be back
An alternative if they need immediate assistance (i.e. an employee’s address)

With such an email, you can keep prospects engaged until you get back to work. Make sure you send them a personalized message by then.

2. Categorize Inquiries

Most of the time, instead of prospects immediately buying your products or availing of your services, they’ll have questions first. Customers often ask questions, like:

Is the value right for the price?
Is there a guarantee?
How is it different from other similar products?

Although that’s a good thing since you know they’re interested, receiving a lot of inquiries can be time-consuming. What’s worse is that most inquiries ask the same questions. As a result, your employees will spend most of their time dealing with these emails, even if the answer is already pre-determined. Their productivity and motivation will plummet, which may hurt your business, and you don’t want that. So, how can email forwarding help?

What an email forwarding service does is that it searches key terms on the emails sent by prospects. After detecting terms commonly included on many previous emails, it can categorize all emails with a similar message and reply to these emails at once.

For example, if a prospect asked a question about the price an hour ago and you get the same question from four different prospects, an email forwarding service categorizes these inquiries and other messages asking about price and sends each of the addresses the same answer. For that very reason, most businesses incorporate email forwarding services with knowledge management systems. That way, all questions are answered almost immediately and accurately.

3. Avoid Spam

You know very well how boring it can be to check each of your addresses for emails as most of the emails are spam. In addition to being a waste of time, spam emails can also clog both the inbox and server of your business, not to mention spams already come in different shapes and sizes. So, unless you read the complete message, you may have a hard time finding out which is spam and which is genuine.

Some of the common types of spam emails include:

Advertisements
Scams
Virus and malware messages
Chain letters
‘Get rich quick’ schemes

It may not completely eliminate spams, but an email forwarding service is better than nothing. Not only does it lower the number of spams you receive every day, you can also make your inbox look more professional by deflecting obvious spams.

4. Easy To Use

Email forwarding is a practice that you can use freely, but doing it by yourself means you have to learn everything there is to know about email forwarding.

If you’re a busy person, time is not a luxury you can easily afford. You may be saving money by DIYing, but you’re also losing money by spending time on needless tasks. Besides, an email forwarding service is not that expensive. Moreover, most email forwarding services offer a dedicated server and platform where you can set things up easily and quickly.

If you really don’t have time to dabble with email forwarding, you can always assign the task to your employees. Considering how convenient email forwarding platforms are, your employees might get the hang of it faster than expected, regardless of whether they’re techie or not.

5. Branding And Role Distribution

Email forwarding services are also capable of creating email aliases.

As the name suggests, an email alias refers to a substitute email for your address. For example, if your address is johndoe7901212@yahoo.com and your company is named ‘John Doe,’ you can create an alias of sales@johndoe.com.

These email aliases can’t exist by themselves without the email forwarding platform. They got no inbox or login credentials, and they can’t send messages either. So, why should you use them?

There are two ways to use this feature of email forwarding services:

Branding: With addresses like info@johndoe.com and clients@johndoe.com, it’s much easier to know that you’re an established brand.
Role Distribution: If your business consists of different departments, you’ll need email aliases. For example, you have a marketing department and a sales department. There’s no way of telling if a certain address belongs to which department. In that case, you can simply create an alias like sales@johndoe.com, for the sales department and marketing@johndoe.com for the marketing department.

Not only can you make your business look more professional to prospects, you can also make the workflow within your company smoother. In other words, no matter how you look at it, it’s a win-win.

6. Simultaneous Forwarding

After you make a decision that affects your employees, it’s common courtesy to send them the information regarding your decision.

The first thing you have to do is create a draft for the email. On the recipient field, you need to add your employees’ addresses one by one. So, what does email forwarding has to do with it? You probably already know the answer. Yes, you can simultaneously send the same email to all your employees using an email forwarding service. How this works is that the email forwarding service will create an email that represents all your employees. Think of it as a group ‘chat,’ but for emails.

You can also create an email for different departments representing all employees involved. Doing so will further make the workflow smoother.

7. Updates

No matter what industry you’re in, your business will often experience sudden updates. Perhaps, your business has grown to the point that you need a new email for your portfolio. Maybe, you need to change your email provider due to an issue. Unfortunately, your business cards already have your business address printed on them, so what do you do?

In that case, you can opt for an email forwarding service and redirect all the emails that are sent to your old address into your new one. Simply put, with an email forwarding service, you can avoid any damage that sudden updates can do to your business.

Wrapping Up

After reading this guide, it’s quite clear why email forwarding services are the trend nowadays, especially for businesses. Although these benefits mainly involve businesses, email forwarding also offers a lot of benefits if you’re just using email providers for communication. At the end of the day, you’re the one who decides whether you’ll use email forwarding service or not.

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