Outsourcing Your Email

In today’s society, we are all looking for ways to make our daily tasks easier to manage. This is important in business as well. Outsourcing has been a way to save time and money for a while, and businesses are benefiting. Another area of business that can be outsourced is email. But, before you do, consider whether your business needs to do this.

Outsourcing is contagious. You could be on the Home Depot website trying to get customer service help and your customer service representative could be answering your questions from India. Computers and the Internet allow us to perform a number of tasks from anywhere in the world. Now, email is becoming the newest thing we decide to outsource. Here are some of the pros and cons of doing so.

Pros:

Outsourcing saves time. For highly successful businesses, email inboxes can receive upwards of thousands of emails a day. If you were to sift through that yourself and answer each one, there wouldn’t be time in the day to do anything else. Your emails would dwindle, but nothing would get done on the marketing side of the business.

Outsource to an individual that you trust. You can hire a virtual assistant whose job it would be to answer these emails. This person would have to spend time with you learning how you think and what types of responses you expect. As a business professional, they would know what messages needed your attention and which ones they could answer. Their expertise would have to include setting up email servers and folders to effectively manage the emails.

You may outsource to an email service that does nothing but handle email. Their services would provide the servers needed to handle multiple email accounts and the features that make organizing that mail easier. Because they deal with email exclusively, they continually implement technology that will benefit you.

Cons:

Can you trust another person reading your email? Any other source that you use to deal with your email has to be secure. You wouldn’t want sensitive material being accessed by just anyone. Using an email service that is not secure is asking for trouble.

There is something to be said for reading your own email. An assistant or email service can answer for you but they are not you. There is the potential for emails to be answered incorrectly when someone else is doing the job. An email may get filed into the wrong folder and missed.

Outsourcing is not always necessary for smaller businesses or businesses with only one email address. To solve the problem of massive emails, choosing an email provider who has the features you need is a more viable option. It could be a matter of filing them automatically so that they are easy to look at later when you have time.

Depending on your needs, outsourcing email is an option to pursue. But, before deciding on a plan, it is wise to consider the pros and cons of all options.