Email remains one of, if not the most widely used form of electronic communication to this day. A report by a technology market research firm in 2019 saw the number of email accounts worldwide rise to nearly 5.6 billion, with 246.5 billion emails sent or received per day for that year. It also cites that users receive at least three emails for every email sent. There’s no reason for that number to drop two years later, owing to email’s versatility. Aside from composing messages, email can also carry files (up to a specific size limit) and be sent or received from any device anywhere. Businesses have used email to significant effect, not only to send or receive essential correspondences but also to initiate marketing campaigns but now also as a tool for productivity with an email forwarding service.
In a competitive, fast-paced economy, getting caught without a working email can cost businesses dearly. Even as a business changes emails, it still needs to remind its contacts about the change, or any critical emails won’t get through. Fortunately, technology allows for one email to direct all messages to several contacts at once. This is called email forwarding or email redirect.
To know how an email forwarding service works, here’s a short scenario.
ABC Ltd. receives an exciting partnership proposal from DEF Corp. via email. ABC Ltd. wants its sales department to be informed of this proposal, but adding dozens of contacts as recipients is just time-consuming. Nor DEF Corp. can be bothered to send the email to everyone in ABC’s sales department.
With email forwarding, ABC Ltd. can have a single email receiving all messages and redirecting them to all linked contacts. Think of it as a digital receptionist with the added benefit of:
With the right email forwarding setup done by providers like ForwardMX, businesses can spend less effort in making sure everyone gets the message. Depending on the plan, an email forwarding address has no limit to the number of individual addresses it can handle and the number of emails it can forward.
Since it’s only there to forward messages, a redirect address doesn’t maintain its own inbox, unlike a standard account. This adds to security, especially for very important private communique.
An email forwarding service develops and manages their own app, which can be accessed either via a computer’s browser or mobile app. The user interface is designed so that almost everyone can use it without too much effort. While they may vary by app, the steps are generally threefold.
Some services also come with a “catch-all” setting. This allows the system to send back a kind of error message if an email is sent to an address not registered as a forwarder.
The app can also be linked with certain web hosting services such as Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress, adding to its ease of use.
Keep in mind that replying to an email forwarded by the system won’t necessarily use the redirect address as the sender. It will instead use the individual account recorded under the redirect address. This is an easy mistake to make, which can cost a business’s professional image to suffer.
Perhaps the most important benefit of having an email forwarding service is having a professional-looking email address for the business. Something like “[email protected]” exudes an aura of formality more than “[email protected]” or “[email protected].” However, there’s more to having such an address other than the name.
A 2016 survey found out that a third of customers are less trusting of a business with a basic email address, while around a quarter express concern about sharing their personal info. As transactions for the first time mostly happens via email, the kind of address it sports is important to establish a good first impression.
The survey also showed that business email is the fourth most considered factor for clients to trust a business, just under website security, content, and online reviews.
Setting up an entirely new professional address won’t be necessary with an email forwarding service. Anyone can still use their most used email account without worrying about the address looking too fishy. Leave it to the redirect address to uphold a business’s image.
