BlueTie Blog

What Small Businesses Want From Email

Today's small and medium sized business are looking for a high quality, full-featured email suite that meets the needs of their growing business without having to spend a lot of money. How do we know? We asked them.

The combination of cost and feature set is a critical balance for growing companies. They want to "...decrease costs without sacrificing functionality." And they need an "...inexpensive way to get all the functionality that larger businesses rely on for email and collaboration...". They need a way for their staff to work more efficiently together to service a growing base of customers and transactions. They need tools that let them service more customers without hiring more staff.

So as businesses grow, the ability for staff to coordinate work becomes more important. Many "...have grown as a company  and realize [they] need advanced email and collaboration tools." Increased coordination/collaboration can allow for specialization, each person is a specialist at specific functions and thus information can be passed from person to person for action efficiently, or it can be used to 'load balance' the workload by letting multiple people perform the same tasks and thus share the workload. Businesses are looking for email with integrated and shared, calendars, tasks, files and contacts.

This might all seem obvious to some but for many business owners answering the question of how to increase productivity can be complex. And if you're running a very small business, hard to recognize. Communications and coordination amongst staff is just one area of opportunity to do so and may not be so obvious depending on the type of business.

We also heard consistently that a professional appearance is also important to a growing business. Just because it's a small business doesn't mean they want their email screaming it when communicating via email with distributors, vendors or customers. This is why every small business needs an email service that provides domain support. An email service that lets them send and receive email from their own web domain. The number of small business that are still using 'free-mail' consumer email accounts without their own companies domain is still very large. If you own a small business, you can have your own email address domain even if you don't have an extensive web site.  Additionally, if you have your own web site, you can point your email to any good email provider, with the collaboration tools you need to increase productivity,  you don't have to use the email tools provided by your web host - which likely are not specifically designed for businesses.

What do you think small businesses need from their email service? If you're not already using BlueTie what are you using and how's it working for you? If you are already using BlueTie how are you using it to improve productivity at your business?

Creating Links in Email: Don't load your email messages up with attachments and images

When you use email to send a customer newsletter, follow-up after a sales call or respond to a request for information, it's important to be considerate of the recipient when composing the message. I frequently receive emails with multiple attachments and I seldom open them. Although BlueTie supports an industry leading attachment size of 25MB, many recipient's email systems can't handle really big attachments. Also, opening an attachment adds another step to the process a customer or prospect has to go through to get your message, decreasing the likelihood they will actually see it.

Fortunately there's a simple fix. Put your messages on your web site as web pages or PDF documents and link to them in your email. This keeps the email simple and gives your recipients a one click way to access the info. There are two ways you can embed web links into your email:

• Simply copy and paste the URL from the target page into the email
• Even better (and more professional), use our Link tool. Choose the word or phrase in your email message that you want to link to the web page, highlight it and click the Link tool- it looks like a little chain. Paste the web page URL into the dialog box that appears. You can also add a Tooltip. This is a description of the link that appears when the user mouses over the link. So you might link to a sales doc and your tooltip might say: AntiSpam Information. Click OK in the dialog box and you're done.

Anyone who has received an email with tons of pictures and attachments will really appreciate this approach. Instead of loading the email itself with large images and attachments, link to them on the web. You'll save your customers time, your message is less likely to get blocked as spam (multiple attachments are a red flag) and you'll drive traffic to your web site.

Work Anywhere

It's that time of year when all the bloggers post their prediction lists on everything from global warming to the latest tech gadget. We think this is going to be the year of Work Anywhere, a trend that gets predicted every year but has not turned into something that affects small businesses as a whole. Until now.

To have a Work Anywhere business you need to be providing some kind of expert services rather than physical services. If you sell things you can also have a Work Anywhere biz. So why do we think this business model will hit its stride in '07?

Here's a few reasons:

• Bandwidth, wi-fi and EVDO. Its getting harder and harder to be somewhere where you can't connect and connect fast. This is critical to the Work Anywhere model.
• SaaS. Software as a Service is what BlueTie does- we provide you with a communication, collaboration and organization suite you can access anywhere from any computer. In the past year I've logged into my BlueTie account in an Internet cafe in Paris, a hotel room in NYC, in a conference in SF, at my friend's camp in the Adirondacks...and, regardless of where I log in or what machine I'm using, there's all my stuff: email, calendar, people, files. I don't need to be in my office or my home office at all. And I can see my co-workers presence online, IM (with BlueTie Pro), email, etc. I might as well be across the hall.
• A big change in understanding how to motivate people. Best Buy's corporate offices now run on a radical new model: no set hours, no schedules, no required attendance. You have your work goals, your deadlines and your resources; you do the work any way that works for you. Productivity is up 30%. This was not a great leap of faith for their upper management. It started as a grassroots effort. Small workgroups heard about the model and surreptitiously started adopting it. By the time execs realized what was going on, the proponents had data and it was impossible to ignore.
• Timeshifting and placeshifting. This is an extension of the previous bullet. If you're a knowledge worker and you have the resources you need, why should you be constrained to work within a nine to five system that evolved from the need to take advantage of daylight? We've got lightbulbs!

Years ago there was a big buzz about 'virtual businesses'. The problem was that the tools to make these businesses work were in their infancy. Now with ubiquitous access, online resources and mobile communication you can run a business from anywhere, on your own terms.

Liberation 2007: Work Anywhere!

CRN Review: BlueTie Takes On Exchange

Today we received a very favorable review in CRN that focuses on the fact that, unlike many of our competitors, we are a business application, designed to be straightforward to use, easily managed and reliable. One of the great aspects of the review, from our POV, is the positioning of BlueTie as an alternative to Microsoft Exhange, the costly middle market messaging solution from the 10,000 lb gorilla. We set out eight years ago to provide small and medium size businesses with a real alternative to paying for racks of servers, licenses and ongoing service fees to keep those overly complex systems running. Reviews like this validate our vision!

Small Business Disaster Recovery

Now that the mild 2006 hurricane season is over small business owners in coastal areas are breathing a collective sigh of relief, knowing that they are safe for a while from Katrina-type disasters. Ironically, this is exactly the time when you should be working on a disaster recovery plan for your business.

Just as sales and marketing are always planning forward (because they know you are only as successful as your next win), disaster recovery plans should be put in place long before the potential for a problem is looming. After all, no one wants to be in the news scrambling for the last sheet of plywood at the Home Depot as the winds start to rise.

Any small business, regardless of location, needs to think about what would happen if you experienced an unexpected disaster. Fire, flooding from a broken sprinkler system, loss of a key employee, theft of intellectual property- these are all potential business-busting scenarios.

The first and easiest step is to secure your data. Wait, you say...we're not a technology business, we don't have data. Wrong. You have customer lists, vendor lists, contracts and proposals in progress, product specs and code, plans and more. This is all data. The first step is to get that data into a format and place that is offsite and accessible by more than one person. Since all of these data examples can be digital, you can store all of them in a BlueTie account using files, contacts and email. With 5GB per user, keeping current versions of your business intelligence and assets in BlueTie is a great back-up in the event of disaster.

One of our favorite customer quotes is from a real estate broker who said the reasons she uses BlueTie include: " If I drop my laptop in a puddle or leave it on the roof of my car, with BlueTie I'm still in business." While we hope she's not speaking from personal experience (!), it is a great point.

Disaster recovery is an important business management responsibility. You don't want years of work destroyed in an instant. The SBA offers a good resource site on the subject as a starting point. The Disaster Recovery Journal also offers links to useful information.

It only a few minutes to lose a business. Isn't it worth spending a few hours planning to avoid a disaster?

Your New Business: Start-up Basics, Part One

A lot of BlueTie Free companies are start-ups. That's not surprising given that setting up email, contacts and files are all important 'day one' activities for a new business. Here's a start-up checklist to help you get your business up and running ASAP:

• Web Site URL. This is the website address for your new company. Choosing the right one is critical as you'll want to use it for the life of the company. In fact, you really can't settle on a name for your business without making sure you can get a related URL. You don't need a website to get a URL- you can register as many as you want and then build your website when you're ready. You will want a URL on day one because you're going to want a business-specific email address for you and your employees. BlueTie offers this (known as domain support) but you need a registered domain URL (name.com). Go for a .com address. It's still the gold standard for business because most searchers will automatically look for .com rather than .net or .us or .biz. If you can afford it, register all four for your name. You register by going to a domain registrar and doing searches for your preferred URL. Your best bet is a word combination of 8-12 letters and/or numbers. Virtually every address with less is taken. Avoid dashes and underscores. It will take a few tries. Be patient as this decision will be critical to the success of your business going forward.
• Organize Your Contacts. Your Contact list is the lifeblood of your business. Set up Groups in your Contacts for Customers, Sales, Vendors, Friends and Family, Investors, Mentors, etc. Get some names in there and keep adding as you meet new ones. You've got a business card right? (Another day one activity- of course you need your email address and website for your card, so get BlueTie set up and get that domain.) Always trade cards with new people you meet and get them entered into your Contacts and matched to the appropriate Groups. A little time spent each morning maintaining your Contacts means that you can quickly and easily communicate with everyone interested in your business with a single click.
• Do you have sales literature, contracts, forms, presentations and other docs that you may need access to wherever you are? Upload them to Files so you can access them from any location. Here's a valuable tip: When you name these files use this format: year-month-filename.type. An example is 2006-12-sellsheet.doc. If you do this you can easily sort by name and see the most recent versions of your files.

We'll be continuing this series to help your start-up get organized and to help you and your people communicate effectively. Being consistent, easy to reach and organized can make a huge difference as you embark on the often chaotic process of starting a business. Good luck!