Planning Ahead
If you are the only person in your business it is easy to think everything should just come to your inbox. But, it pays to think ahead with your e-mail account structure. Later on when your company is 3 people, 10 people, or maybe 50-100 people, it will be obvious you need separate email inboxes for various departments and communication channels.
At the solopreneur level, setting up a few strategic email accounts and forwarding those accounts to your individual email inbox will leave you in a good position when bring on new team members down the road.
If you start this now, you will also train your customers (and automated web services) to send different types of updates, requests, or information to the correct e-mail.
Avoid the nightmare of an individual inbox stuffed with everything from Google reviews to Workers Compensation invoices!
Having some structure set up in the original To: Field will help you use filters to sort e-mails into their correct folders too.
TLDR
Make an email account for each department – such as accouning@yourdomain.com.
Register those accounts with the email of the related department.
In the beginning of your company, you can forward every email account to your work email account. This way, all emails initially flow to you.
When your company grows to the point that other people are responsible for some task, you simply forward the email account (with all of the related messages) to the individual or group that is responsible for taking care of that task.
For example:
- Communication channels go to support staff
- Sales leads go to sales staff
- Marketing emails, youtube, and analytics accounts go to marketing staff
- Office admin tasks are forwarded to the office admin
Email Account Structure
When you first start brining your business concept online, you will want to set up an email account for every department or communication channel of your business – even if you are the only person in the company at the moment. If you are a company of one, forward all of the accounts below to your individual business email account. Usually yourname@yourdomain.com
As your company grows various e-mail accounts will forwarded to:
- Various Departments
- A Ticket System
- A CRM System
For almost all of the emails below, I would set the sender’s name to your company’s name.
Be sure to set up a gmail account for marketing and a separate gmail one for youtube.
The Many Types of Email
Think through the types e-mail you will be getting from the outside world. Let’s brainstorm what is filling up our inbox, shall we?
New Client Emails
- New Sales / Prospective Clients
- Replies & Quotes
- Questions About Your Service
Current Client Emails
- Customer Service
- Billing
- Cancelations
- Updates About Their Service
- Questions
Product Support
- Technical Questions
- Product Returns
- Tech Support
- Feature Requests
Messages From Web Applications
- Automated Email Open Rates
- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools Warnings
- Comments From YouTube
- Customer Survey Results
- New Google Reviews
- Google My Business Updates
CRM Generated Emails
- There are a ton of these
- They usually require some kind of action by office admins
Accounting, HR, Government Emails
- Worker’s Compensation Updates
- Payroll Service
- SOS Filings
- Reset passwords for Accounting Software
Setting Up an Email Host
Setting up a number of e-mails can get pricey with consumer level products such as the Google Suite. It is also very, very difficult to move your e-mails out of Google Suite if you ever want to change to something else.
I recommend Siteground because they let you set up as many emails@yourdomain.com as you like with your monthly subscription. Siteground also has wonderful customer service. I used the GrowBig plan to get started.
Siteground Recommended
I recommend Siteground because they let you set up as many emails@yourdomain.com as you like with your monthly subscription. Siteground also has wonderful customer service. I used the GrowBig plan to get started.
Siteground is one of the most common and one of the best value hosts for small business and small (smaller than amazon) e-commere websites. If you are new to wordpress, check out our recommended wordpress tech stack, which will get you started off on the right foot.
Email Client
We set up our employees and contractors with the Thunderbird e-mail client because Thunderbird is free and very powerful.
Email Account Size
An email that is getting used all of the time, such as the owner’s e-mail address, should be between 4-6 gb. That will hold about 3-10 years of e-mails depending on usage.
For regular use 2-3 gb is good. For lite use 1 gb will hold plently of emails. Siteground only charges you for the memory you use.
yourname@yourdomain.com
This is your individual business e-mail. It will be your main account. Forward all e-mails that you need to see here – in the early days at least, pretty much everything will be forwared here. It is OK to forward something to office@yourdomain.com then forward from the office acount to the yourname account.
Just because you hire someone does not mean they need an individual e-mail account. You may just want to set them up with the office@yourdomain.com or frontdesk@yourdomain.com to start.
hello@yourdomain.com
This is the e-mail that is advertised on your website, submitted web forms for sales leads, marketing copy, and maybe even some business cards. It is often the first point of contact you have with prospective customers. Plenty of existing customers will e-mail you about updates or service requests too.
If you are the only person in the company, this e-mail should forward to office@yourdomain.com. Then forwarded from office@yourdomain.com to yourname@yourdomain.com so you can respond directly.
Later these e-mails can be forwarded directly into a CRM system such as Infusionsoft other automation software such as Unifiecom for Amazon sellers.
Other common names for this account are:
- info@yourdomain.com
- contact@yourdomain.com
- sales@yourdomain.com
- hey@yourdomain.com (informal)
- quote@yourdomain.com
support@yourdomain.com
If you have a tech, SaaS, or physical products based company, I recommend setting up a ticketing system, such as Zendesk, right away. This will handle all tech support, customer questions about your product, feature requests.
office@yourdomain.com
When your company grows to the point that you start to hand off routine tasks, it is common to hire a two or three office admins. An office admin handles on-boarding new customers, handles customer support, updates and maintains daily CRM tasks, and covers other established processes. Generally there is only one office admin per shift at first, so I like to have all office admin’s use and reply to one office admin e-mail account. This way nothing is missed or replied to twice. Later if the volume & velocity of these tasks increase you can invest in more enterprise level software that can spread out these tasks.
Accounts forwarded to the office admin account are:
- Incoming sales leads from hello@yourdomain.com
- Generated mail from your CRM system
- E-mails generated from Social Media
Like many other company e-mail accounts, the sender’s name of the office@yourdomain.com account should be the name of your company.
If you have a service based business you will want some way to externally track what is going on with this account. Also be aware that you will want a backup of this account because the user has all permissions.
My team really likes Trello for keeping track of customer service items. In the future we may move to Zendesk or Asana will help automate support & sales.
When you are ready to bring on an office admin, I like to have one address that is a landing spot for any customer update, sales lead, billing questions, or anything needs to be taken care of on a regular basis. Depending on your the type of company, alternative names for this account might be:
- yourcompanyname@yourdomain.com
- frontdesk@yourdomain.com
marketing@yourdomain.com
This one is for:
- Automated Email Systems- MailerLite – Mail Chimp
- Customer Surveys – SurveyMonkey
- SEO & Other Directories – Yelp – Bing Places – Mapquest
- User experience software – Hotjar
- Stickers & Magnets – Lizard Labels – StickerMule – Sticker Giant
- Social media, (other than Facebook) – Linkedin, Imgur
- Stock Art, Font Suppliers, etc
To my knowledge, for Facebook My Business you will need to login with your Facebook credentials.
jobs@yourdomain.com
I use this one for job postings on indeed. There is always a flood of applicants and it is impossible to sort through them if they land in your daily driver account. This is the only account that I do not forward to my personal account.
I also ask applicants to write a 50-100 word cover letter. This makes it really easy to go through and delete applicants that did not follow the process.
This was actually the account that prompted me to put together a structured e-mail system.
owner@yourdomain.com
This one is for those items that should only go to the owner. There is not much of this but, it is nice to have the option if you come across something you would like admin permissions and would like to add your usual account as a user with standard permissions.
Also, if you ever want to sell your business, having a few things set up in an owner account can make your e-mail an easy switch.
company@gmail.com or marketing@gmail.com
You will want a gmail address to access all of the wonderful tools that Google has to offer.
- Google My Business
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
- Google Serach Console
- Google Optimize – A/B Testing
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Social media (other than Facebook)
- Stock Art, Font Suppliers, etc
To my knowledge, for Facebook My Business you will need to login with your Facebook credentials.
youtube@gmail.com
We have a separate e-mail so multiple team members can access it.
voice@gmail.com
Google voice is a really easy way to get a second number coming straight into your mobile phone. It is not quite a business grade phone system, but you can take calls, sms, and mms. It can be integrated with Hangouts for more connectivity options. You can only be logged into one account at a time.
GoDaddy’s Smart Line is an option, that totally came out of the blue, for a second line on your mobile phone. I’m not a huge fan of GoDaddy, but somehow they are the first that I know of that offer this type of service – It is not a VoIP, they actually use your cellular data – black magic I say.
accounting@yourdomain.com
This one is for:
- Accounting software – Quickbooks Online – xero – Wave
- Payroll account – Gusto
- Company credit cards – Capitol One Spark
- Tax software – TurboTax
- Credit Card Payment Gateway – Authorize.net
- Merchant Account – First Data
I would not put bank accounts on any shared e-mail. I keep bank accounts on a separate gmail account with two-factor authorization.
web@yourdomain.com
All of your web services under one name can be helpful if you pass off web duties to a third party. It is wise to use different usernames for these services for security.
- Webhost – Siteground, DigitalOcean
- Domain Registrar – Cloudflare
- Any other web service
amazon@yourdomain.com
As your company grows, you may want a few people to see orders from Amazon, such as accounting, the office, or maybe operations.
- Forward to accounting@yourdomain.com
- Forward to office@yourdomaincom
Feedback@yourdomain.com
If you have a feedback form, send it here. You may want to forward this to a few team members in real time.
If you are not sure if you should add this one, check out 50 Cent’s book, The 50th Law. Feedback is, of course, critical.
subscribe@some-domain.com
Ahh, all those spammy subscriptions. If they are all To: spammy@some-domain.com, you can filter them all to the trash.
Going Further
Some other common accounts might be:
- sales@yourdomain.com
- shipping@yourdomain.com
This will give you a solid foundation, but every company is different.
Whatever department you have, make an e-mail for it. It is convenient to just set up a forwarder when a new hire comes on board or you want to add responsibility to a current employee or contractor.
Please comment below if you have other systems or ideas about how to handle e-mail. We love to hear from our readers!