Does your team have trouble keeping track of your team’s email address? Do you want to make it easier for people on your team to reach out to you with requests, questions, and feedback? Do you want a way for team members to quickly find the email address of another team member so they can reach out directly? If so, then you need a company e-mail address manager.
A company e-mail address manager keeps track of all your company’s e-mail addresses in one place — and makes it easy for different team members to get in touch with you. It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds or just a few dozen employees; a company e-mail address manager will still be helpful. To help you get started thinking about how to best use a company e-address manager, here are some recommendations:
Don’t use the same e-mail address for everything
This tip is especially important for those new to the company e-mail address manager. Most e-address managers have a “landing page” where you simply enter the e-mail address of the team member you’d like to send a request to, and the e-mail manager will automatically generate a list of potential recipients.
Unfortunately, this system is not very flexible. You can’t easily remove the e-address from the manager and easily add a new team member. You can’t easily create a campaign to send personalized emails to every team member in your company.
Fortunately, there is an easier way: don’t use the same e-mail address for everything. If you have a different e-mail address for different teams, you’re essentially saying “anyone can contact me with any question or suggestion.” And that’s not a good look. If you have to have your team’s e-mails visible on a public server, or if you have to share them with colleagues, then you need a company e-address manager.
Set up an account for every team member
Every company has employees who are just shy of being full-time. Some will be doing a significant amount of work every day, while others will be doing light work during the week and a little bit of night work on the weekend.
With that in mind, it’s important to make sure each team member has a way to get in touch with you. You can do that by setting up an account for every team member on your team. When a team member signs up for an account, they’ll create a username and password.
You can use that account to log into your administrative account, and you can add those credentials to every e-mail you send using the account. A great feature to keep in mind when creating an account is that you can set it up so that each account can be easily linked to a particular project. That way, each account will just be for the person’s own project, instead of you having to share every e-mail with every team member on your team.
Send out company newsletters with a company e-mail
When you have a regular delivery schedule in place, it’s easy to forget about the occasional newsletter. But having a system in place to send regular company newsletters is crucial to having a healthy company culture. Companies that send quarterly or yearly financial statements or other reports to their investors or company members should follow this process.
Companies that don’t should consider switching to a monthly or bi-monthly reporting system. Companies that follow a monthly or bi-monthly company e-mail newsletter should keep this process as simple as possible. The process should involve creating a simple spreadsheet, where each cell refers to the month or the number of newsletters to be sent.
When you create the spreadsheet, you can input the number of newsletters to be sent, the approximate number of members on each team, and the date of the next newsletter. For example, if you have 10 team members, and you want to send out the first newsletter on the 1st of January, then your spreadsheet should look like this: 1999-01-01T10-01-00 This spreadsheet method is quick and easy. It will also help you keep track of who has received which newsletters, which is important for maintaining a healthy company culture.
Beyond that, you can use this method to report any type of news or factoid that pertains to the entire company. For example, if you have a newsworthy event or accomplishment, you can send a quick e-mail to the entire company and include the date and the details. You can also use this method to send thanks or other rewards for a job well done.
Help your employees take care of their own addresses
As much as you’d like to see everyone on your team using your e-mail address, that’s not always realistic. There are bound to be times when a colleague needs to reach out to you but doesn’t have your e-mail address. That’s why it’s important to have an address for each team member that you work with.
You can set up an account for each team member for their own convenience, or you can make each account automatically delete itself after a certain period of time. You can also use various tools to automatically send out company e-mails from a certain address.
In Gmail, go to Settings, then Accounts, and then add a new account. In iCloud, select Manage Findings in the left-hand column, then select Add a Contact. In each account you add a contact, you can set up a “hotline” that automatically sends company e-mail. You can set the hotline to automatically call that person, or you can set it up so that they have to enter their e-mail address themselves.
Don’t use Gmail or other services without the option to add custom URLs
Most e-address managers come with the option to create a custom URL. That is, you can put a website or a phone number in the field for the e-mail address and have it automatically map to that address. Unfortunately, this system doesn’t exist in the industry standard e-address manager.
So, if you want to use an e-address manager and don’t mind manually entering each address, you can. Many companies that use Gmail already have custom URL support in place, and you should check if your e-address manager doesn’t come with this feature. Otherwise, you can manually enter each address in your e-address manager, and your e-mail software will handle the rest.
Conclusion
Choosing the right company e-address manager can make or break your company. If your company uses a lot of e-mail, then choosing the right manager could mean the difference between receiving important messages and being left waiting on the front line. Use these tips to help you choose the right manager for your company.