7 Best Practices in Selling and Managing Professional Emails

Having highlighted why managing your customers’ e-mails is a crucial activity, let’s now take a practical look at some procedures and good habits that should be adopted when performing sales and management of professional email services.

1. You are the expert, don’t forget that. 

In all probability, your customers don’t understand that much when it comes to IT. Which is also why they are your customers. If you allow them to have the last word on a subject they know little about and leave them with total decision-making power, they will end up asking you for the impossible. And despite all your efforts to please them, in the end they will never be satisfied.

On this sensitive subject you have more knowledge, more experience, more skills: in a word, more authority. Assert your authority when talking to your customers.

2. Introduce yourself as the ‘problem solver’.

The strength of your authority on the subject should translate into trust in you. If a company or professional requires your services, it is because they simply have problems that they cannot solve on their own. The investigation of these problems is a key activity. It will enable you to provide the client with the most suitable solution to his need. Moreover, by having him list all his problems you will create in him a sense of urgency that will make him less price sensitive.

3. Be proactive in proposing new innovations. 

The fact that your customer does not ask you to adopt something new, certainly does not mean that he does not need it. More likely he does not know it at all. Usually an individual is inclined to try a new product or service from the first professional who tells him about it and proposes it. If you are lazy and limit yourself to passive management of your customers, your wiser competitor will soon present a ‘news’ to your customer and succeed in snatching him away from you.

4. Choose a solution that is easy to manage. 

Adopt or create a system that is easy to manage and does not waste your time. As we discussed, email management is a fundamental practice that you should do, but unless it is done on a large scale, it cannot be your core business. So being a fundamental activity but not the No. 1 item in your revenue, you should create practices that allow you to manage everything in a simple and possibly centralised way. A solution that can save you time in managing professional e-mails should have some basic features such as:

• Service continuity. This is of course the most important feature, a discontinuous service results in constant requests for assistance from your customers.
• Centralised management. Managing every aspect of all your customers’ emails from a single application will allow you to work more smoothly. Don’t waste time using different applications.
• Help desk. Trouble-shooting tools are crucial. In troubleshooting, it often takes longer to investigate the problem than to actually solve it. With the right help desk tools, you can drastically reduce the time spent on investigation. And you can give your customers immediate answers on what is happening and how it could be solved. I don’t have to explain to you how important this is.
• Division of tasks. If you use collaborators or employees, you should look for a solution that allows you to divide the tasks related to email management in a simple and clear matter. This way, all your co-workers will be clear about which actions they will have to perform, which will greatly improve your workflow.

5. Set up your chosen system well and instruct your customers. 

Spending the necessary time on the initial set-up is crucial to having fewer difficulties in the future.

By minimising your customers’ problems you are also minimising the time you will lose solving them. At the same time you are maximising your profit by reducing service requests. This concept also applies from your customers’ perspective. If everything is set up correctly, and customers have a minimum of knowledge about how email works, they too will save time and be grateful to you.

6. Deliverability, this unknown. 

Deliverability refers to the ability of an email message to be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Clearly, it is an indispensable characteristic. To promote it, there are a few tricks you can take, regardless of the system you have chosen.

• Authentication. Use identification protocols such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC to confirm to mail clients the legitimacy of the sender. This is the first step in ensuring that messages reach their destination.
• IP Address and SMTP Reputation. Check that the IP address associated with the domain is not on any blacklist and that the SMPT protocol has a good reputation. If the domain and IP address are ‘virgins’ they will initially have a dubious reputation, as they have no history and e-mail providers will treat them with particular care. In this case, a ‘warm-up’ phase for the IP address is recommended. For instance, sending messages to known addresses to create threads, so that the providers will assess the IP address positively.
• Beware of email marketing. Don’t use the same sending parameters for both email marketing and professional email messages. This will lead to a certain decrease in deliverability. Therefore, adopt dedicated protocols when using email as a marketing tool.

7. Email Security. 

Everyone knows this, but it’s worth remembering. Today, 90 per cent of cyber threats to companies and professionals come through email. Make sure that the system you choose has an adequate level of protection built in. If it does not, you should definitely get external services to strengthen your customers’ email security.

If you put these simple procedures into practice with all your customers, you will implement learning economies that will transform professional email management from an uninteresting, time-consuming activity to an easy-to-manage activity that will allow you to retain your customers and add to your turnover.

Now that you know the best practices for professional email management, all that’s left to do is to evaluate which solutions you could adopt.

Qboxmail offers training courses and commercial material dedicated to MSP and Web Agencies

If you are looking for a professional service to manage your customers’ emails, Qboxmail could be for you.

Qboxmail is a provider that offers an email service in the Cloud aimed in particular at companies, equipped with powerful management tools dedicated to Resellers and Hosting Providers. The Resellers Program offers training courses and dedicated commercial material to help you leave a mark on your customers and effectively sell our services.

For more information contact us, we will be happy to explain our services in detail.

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In the next article, we will analyse the alternatives offered by the market, highlighting their pros and cons.