Gmail

     Thankfully most small businesses now realize that using hotmail or yahoo as their business email address probably doesn’t send the right message. Using an email address that matches the domain for your business website is absolutely a must.

Why

     Some ISP hosted email can be a bit limited and running all your email through a desktop client like Outlook has its own set of limitations – most notably when it comes to the need to share with a team.

     Google Apps for Business has, in my view, become a very nice option for collaboration as well as email hosting. In addition to the mail, task and calendar sharing, you’ll also have Google Docs and Spreadsheet sharing capability.

     Customer Relations Management systems are great and powerful marketing workhorses capable of funneling leads into campaigns, automating nurturing routines, tracking conversion metrics and interfacing with ordering and accounting systems to create a complete sales machine, but sometimes you just need to keep track of who you contacted and when.

     Using Google’s free suite of tools you can create a nice lightweight CRM system with just a few tweaks along the way. Email has become one of the primary forms of contact and, particularly if you’re already using Gmail, exploring options that allow you to expand on the tool you use the most might be the fastest route to creating a useable CRM option.

How

Set up your domain to be hosted by Google

     Get a Google Apps for business account and move the MX records for your domain to Google’s servers. This way you can use GMail but have all your mail come from john@yourdomain.com. You can also create custom emails for your entire staff.

Use the labels feature

     You can create all the labels you want (think folders) in GMail to move and store all that email that comes in that you need to refer to. You can also use Google labs to tuck sub topics underneath a parent. To create these sub labels you simply use the parent label connected to the sub label ie: clients/nameofclient

Create a feature rich signature

     I use a Firefox add-on called Wisestamp because it offers more that the GMail signature can and lets you create multiple signatures so you can have work and personal signature for example.

Set-up the offline feature

     GMail allows you to access a synced copy of your inbox when you’re offline so you can manage your mail while on an airplane for example. Download Google Gears.

Use the canned responses feature

     Google labs offers a host of options that enhance GMail’s functionality. One that I like is called canned responses. The name is a bit harsh but what it allows you to store email copy that you frequently use and then insert it with one touch. I try to make my canned responses sound very human, but I do use this frequently.

Explore the App Marketplace

     Third party providers are busy creating apps built specifically to work with Google Apps. In many cases you’ll find tools in the Google Apps Marketplace that are new to you and versions of old friends you might want to migrate to Google Apps.

3rd party plugins

• Rapportive is a tool that adds social media data to your contact records, you automatically see LinkedIn or Facebook information on your contacts or anyone that sends you an email. You can also follow and connect with contacts on Twitter or LinkedIn directly from the Gmail interface. This is a great way to get a bigger picture of what your contacts are doing and have instant information on people that send you emails.
• Boomerang is a handy plugin that gives your emails some smarts. When you send an email, for example, you set it to remind you if you don’t hear back from the recipient in a set number of days. Or you set an email in your inbox to go away and put itself back in on a certain day.

     Source: The productivity handbook (John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing) e-book