Google claims there are over 600 million users of its free web email service, Gmail. Within that number are at least several million businesses that use a generic Gmail address to contact customers.
Google sells an almost identical version of Gmail as part of its online productivity suite Google Apps, which costs US$ 5 per user a month. Why you should make a decision to use the paid version of Gmail?
There are seven main reasons which make paying for Gmail a very easy decision.
Image credits : Businessinsider
Custom Email Address : Businesses that use the free version of Gmail can only send emails as contactAdmin@Gmail.com. Notice how your bank, insurance company and airline never use consumer email addresses. The reason they don’t is because it looks cheap. For US$5 a month you can have an email address Contact@yourdomain.com. It looks much more professional and is worth it for the branding value alone.
Double the Storage : The free version of Gmail comes with 15GB of space for your documents, emails, photos and other files. The paid version has 30GB on the US$5 a month plan and unlimited storage for US$10 a month (or 1TB if your business has less than five users). Businesses that deal in Microsoft Office documents rarely touch these limits on a per user basis but as we move to using video more often in work, those storage limits will become more relevant.
Guaranteed Uptime: Google stands behind the paid version of its Gmail with a 99.9% guaranteed uptime. That means the service is designed to operate 24/7 without fail, and that unexpected outages will be less than nine hours a year. While there is no similar guarantee for the free version of Gmail, it rarely has problems either. The guarantee is probably more valuable in theory than reality, as compensation for downtime is limited to the fees paid to Google which are tiny.
Sync Gmail to Microsoft Outlook : Microsoft Outlooks is one of the most popular email clients in the world. However, if you have a free Gmail account it’s not so simple to sync your emails, calendar and contacts. Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is a tool that comes with the paid version of Gmail that lets you use Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 effectively with Google Apps.
You get the cost savings, security and reliability of Google Apps as your email server, while employees can use the interface they prefer for email, contacts, calendar and notes.
24/7 Support :This is a huge incentive, especially for businesses that have started to look beyond Gmail at other parts of the Google Apps suite. The free version of Gmail includes access to Google Docs (word processor), Google Sheets (spreadsheets) and Google Slides (presentations) but if you run into problems then you can’t just pick up the phone and give Google a call. For US$5 a month, you can.
