Let’s say you’re using free Gmail accounts for business email communication. Your email addresses may resemble one or more of these:
abbottsolar@gmail.com
solar-lisa94@gmail.com
abbottsupport@gmail.com
Your employees may even use assorted Yahoo Mail and cable company email addresses for business purposes.
However, your business is growing, and you want to start to use more professional-looking email addresses such as:
jabbott@abbottsolar.com
lisa@abbottsolar.com
support@abbottsolar.com
Consider this:
Potential customers are likelier to do business with a company that uses professional email addresses than one with consumer freemail addresses.
Did you know that you can quickly get business email addresses like the ones above but continue to have the same Gmail user experience you and your staff have accustomed to?
That’s where Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) comes in.
The email offering within Google Workspace is a business version of Gmail. No training is needed for current Gmail users.
You may or may not be fully aware of the extent of your free Gmail account functionality — but your Gmail account includes Meet, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Drawings, My Maps, and Sites.
Google Workspace has collaborative business versions of all these apps and many more. Many businesses weigh the capabilities of Workspace vs. Microsoft 365.
Google Workspace does come at a cost — $6 per user per month for the Basic version. But not only is this a nominal number — it might be one of the more manageable costs you’ve had to justify. You can try Google Workspace for 14 days and up to 10 users for free.
If you already own a domain such as abbottsolar.com for your website address — that you got from a provider such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, or Register.com — there’s a straightforward, one-time setup needed to use the same domain for your Google Workspace email addresses.
If you don’t own a domain, you can buy one from Google Domains after you sign up for a free trial of Google Workspace.
Additional Google Workspace Benefits
Here are the reasons to consider a move to Google Workspace from a free platform.
1. Email Account Ownership
Your company owns all employee email accounts. Your employees don’t own them. What if someone were to leave your company to work for a competitor or to start a competing company, but they own the email address your customers use to contact them?
Within Google Workspace administration, if someone leaves the company, you can immediately change that person’s password and forward any emails sent to their address to someone else. You can also access all of that person’s email history.
You can also keep control of access to other Google accounts, notably the ones that marketers use.
2. File Ownership
With Google Workspace, all Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets created by employees are owned by the company.
Remember that Google Drive is a cloud backup alternative to services such as Dropbox. You could create a company policy that requires employees to back up their local PC or Mac files to the company’s Google Drive.
If, for example, you decided to terminate an employee, you would have full access to all that person’s business files.
3. Document Sharing
Sharing documents with your team is easier when you’re all on the same Google Workspace account. For example, if you wanted to give all employees view-only access to a Google Doc, that can be accomplished with just a few clicks.
4. Group Email Addresses
Above, we referenced the example email address support@abbottsolar.com. You can easily route emails sent to an address like this to multiple people or a customer service system such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Salesforce.
There’s no additional cost for creating group email addresses. Also, you can add as many as you want.
5. Multiple Email Aliases
For any Google Workspace user, multiple email aliases can be created. Here are examples:
jabbott@abbottsolar.com
john.abbott@abbottsolar.com
john@abbottsolar.com
With email aliases, “All roads lead to Rome.” It might be easier to verbally tell someone that your email address is john@abbottsolar.com, even though your business card reads the more formal john.abbott@abbottsolar.com.
There can even be multiple domains associated with each user’s email account.
If you rebrand your company to “Amazing Solar” and get the domain amazingsolar.com, you can tack this domain onto your Google Workspace account as a domain alias. You can swap the new domain with the old domain and make the new domain your primary domain.
The same “all roads lead to Rome” principle applies. Whether an email is sent to john@abbottsolar.com or jabbott@amazingsolar.com, it will go to the same inbox.
6. Ability to Use Outlook as an Email Client
For employees who are accustomed to using Outlook, Google provides Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook.
7. 15x The Daily Quota For the Number of Email Recipients
Consumer Gmail allows for a maximum of 100 email recipients per day. Google Workspace allows for 1,500.
If you want to do an email merge via Gmail natively from Gmail (to your customers, for example), you can reach many more people en masse from your native email client.
Why is sending these emails from Gmail important?
Because email sent natively from Gmail is more likely to end up in a recipient’s Primary tab than an email from a third-party server (such as MailChimp). This can make your marketing campaigns more effective.
8. More File Storage
The default storage for free Gmail accounts is 15GB. For Google Workspace Basic, it’s 30GB per user.
There are several options for increasing storage beyond 30GB per user.
Google Workspace Business includes Shared drives, which gives a business more administrative control over file sharing.
9. The Ability to Make 2-Step Verification Required
Gmail and Google Workspace have an essential security layer called 2-Step Verification (2SV).
If you log into Gmail or Google Workspace from an unknown computer, you can be texted a verification code. You can verify through the mobile Gmail app, which is even more secure.
When you are out of range on your mobile phone, you can carry a set of backup codes in your wallet to securely access your Google Workspace account.
With free Gmail, each person can decide whether to enable 2SV. With Google Workspace, an administrator can make 2SV required for all users.
10. CRM Integration
Eventually, you may invest in a CRM system to better track leads, prospects, customers, jobs, etc.
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Sheets, and Google Drive can all be integrated with Salesforce. Several other CRM systems, including Zoho CRM and Copper, integrate with Gmail and other apps.
11. Single Sign-On To Other Business Applications
Users can be set up to use their Google Workspace credentials to sign in to cloud business applications such as DocuSign, Marketo, Salesforce, and Slack—without having to re-enter their usernames and passwords.
12. A Company Branded User Interface
Your company’s logo can be prominently displayed at the top right of the screen within all of Google Workspace.
13. An Included Online Meeting App
Google Meet is an online meeting experience included with Google Workspace at no extra charge.
Premium features include meetings with up to 250 participants per call and the ability to record meetings to Google Drive.
14. An Online Appointment Scheduler
Google Workspace has a Calendly-like application that’s built into Google Calendar.
This makes it easy for users to manage their publicly-facing availability and publish a meeting scheduler to the web.
15. An Integrated Business Phone System Option
If you have been thinking about a new or upgraded telephone system for your business, there is a paid cloud phone system option that is served up natively from within Google Workspace, and that integrates with Google Workspace.
16. Support
With Google Workspace, there is 24/7 customer support. There is no support for free Gmail.
There are many other benefits to using Google Workspace, but some get a little more technical.
Remember that you can easily forward your personal Gmail account to your business account. That way, whether people send emails to your “old” gmail.com account or your “new” business Gmail account, all emails will end up in your Google Workspace inbox.
Google provides a service if you want to migrate the email from a Gmail account to a Google Workspace account. You can also work with a Google Partner.
Frequently Asked Questions
Based on an annual contract, Google Workspace is $6 per user per month for Business Starter, $12 per user per month for Business Standard, and $18 for Business Plus. The Google Workspace sales team needs to be contacted for a quote on the Enterprise pricing plan.
An annual contract is not required, but the monthly price is higher if you do not have an annual contract.
If you don’t have an annual contract, you can remove a user at any time without paying for that user’s license beyond the month you remove them.
Yes — Google Workspace can be tried for free for 14 days and up to ten users.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Since Google Workspace was born in the cloud, organizations with a solid commitment to the cloud have often selected it. If most of your employees are familiar with Gmail and like to use it, this can make Google Workspace the office suite of choice.
For the most part, Microsoft Office documents can be opened, edited, and saved in Google Workspace. There are exceptions. Microsoft Word documents with Word-specific formatting may not render correctly in Google Docs. Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with complex macros may not open at all.
Google Workspace includes an online meeting app called Google Meet. Any Google Workspace user can initiate a meeting and then share the link with anyone within or outside their organization. Meet includes a dial-in number if needed by any meeting participants.
Yes. Let’s say you own a domain that is your last name — or your first name plus your last name. Google Workspace lets you use Gmail with an email address such as yourfirstname@yourlastname.com instead of yourfirstname@gmail.com.
There is also an offering called Google Workspace Individual that works with your gmail.com email address.
Google Workspace Essentials is designed to coexist with current email and calendaring software, including Microsoft Office 365. Essentials includes Google Meet, Google Drive for secure cloud storage, and Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for content creation and collaboration. Essentials only requires an email address — this does not have to be a Gmail address.