Overview of Basic Zoho Mail Set Up (Non-Care Plan Members)

Transcript

Hi, thanks for joining me. I’m Michele with “Bergh Consulting”. And in this video, I’m going to cover some basics about “Zoho mail”. It is the platform that I recommend for business branded emails. I recommend it over Gmail and Microsoft outlook. I’ve used both of those platforms and they’re great. I just have found that Zoho mail provides many of the same services at a more affordable rate and so far, the free or dollar per email, per month versions have worked great for all of my clients. They definitely have higher levels of account but I love that you can get started for free or for just a dollar a month and still have great service, the features that you need at a much more affordable price.

It’s not that you know, $4 or $5 a month is you know, huge price to pay for great email. But I also find that this works great and over time all that adds up particularly, if you have several email accounts that are branded. That $4 or $5 a month can add up very, very quickly.

So, I just wanted to give you a quick overview of what it looks like to set up. If you’re a client of mine, some of this basic setup I do for you, free of charge. It’s only if you want the more full-featured services that you would be paying for those. So, I decided to go through and set up kind of a dummy account if you will, that I could use to show you how it works. And so I’ve already verified the domain and unfortunately, it won’t let me go back to that. But it was as simple as, let me grab one other screen here, as simple as coming in here and adding a text record in my domain to verify the account.

So very easy to do. It just took a matter of a few minutes and like I said, you don’t have to do that if your clients of mine, i would take care of that for you at no charge. Once you verify the domain, you have to set up at least one email account to get started and then you move into being able to add extra users, which is the next step and this just allows you to add other members of your team. Very simple, just “Add User” you can click right up here to add a user. And you just put in their “First Name” and their “Email Address” and a “Password” are required. And then you have an option to force them to change their password, when they log in for the first time. And whether you do that or not is up to you. I don’t generally force it but I let people know that they might want to change it, the first time they log in. So that they can create something that is strong, but more comfortable or memorable for them.

So you can create as many as you want depending on the level of account that you have and let’s go back here. You can also create “Groups”. So you can group people together, if you have sections of your team that you want to kind of all group together, just to make it easier for emailing purposes. But not something you have to do. You also need to configure your email delivery. These are just a couple more records, that you would enter in with your domain.

Again, I would take care of that for you, if you were a client. And the next step here is the “SPF” and “DKIM”. This helps with delivery. I love how easy this system is. It really just walks you through every step. For this record here, it tells you that you need to set up a “Text record” (TXT Record). Tells you what to put in there. It tells you the value, which you can copy and paste. And if you’re not familiar with this, they also have a video.

You do have to, sometimes this takes a little time to propagate and show that it’s connected. That’s normal. Some take longer than others, it kind of just depends on where your domain is registered and those kind of things.

The second step of this is the configured “DKIM”. And this also helps with delivery. It’s important that you go through this step. Again, it walks you through the entire process. You will have to probably wait a few minutes to verify. The domains, that I have in google domains, verify almost instantly. The domains that I have in other places, sometimes i have to wait almost overnight, you know. So they take a little bit longer. If as long as you know that you did it correctly, then I wouldn’t worry about it taking a while for it to be validated.

The next step that’s available is an “Email Migration”. So if you’re using another system, you can migrate all of those emails into Zoho. So that you have them in one place. I love that that is an option. Most of my clients don’t choose to do that because they actually feed their Zoho mail into another system. Like, their outlook or their Gmail or their MAC mail. But it is an option if you want to be able to view everything here in one spot or if you’re migrating from say a G Suite or Microsoft Outlook System. And you want to move that into Zoho. So that your old existing emails are with your new ones and it’s all in one place.

So they have very simple steps to walk you through. For clients of mine, this would be a separate cost to integrate if needed. But as i said, most just feed this into another system so they don’t need this service done.

And then the last thing is, that with the free version you’re allowed up to five email accounts and you can’t feed your emails into another system. It doesn’t come with POP3 or IMAP type settings. But they have great apps. So if you don’t need to have your emails all in one place or you prefer just to keep them separate, you can use their apps and they’re free. They have a “Mail Admin App”, which gives you access to your entire control panel for all of your emails, your users. They have an “Inbox Insights”, that give you some specific emails that are based on senders to help you kind of keep those important emails separate. This is a great feature and then they have just the “Zoho Mail”, which is just your mail app on a go. So you would download it onto your device, click on it to see all of your mail.

But I love that this one allows you to set up and get notified about specific emails based on the sender or the folders. So you can keep this in a different spot and only be concerned with those really important ones that you don’t want to miss and everything, everything sits in this app, the Zoho mail app. You don’t lose anything. It just really helps cut down on distractions. So another nice feature.

And that’s it. So getting that one set up, adding a few users is a fairly simple process. As I said, if you’re a client, the service is provided for free. I do also want to touch on, why you would want to use a different system than webmail for your emails. So that they’re separate from your website. And I’m going to do that in another video. So if you haven’t watched that one already, I highly suggest that you check it out. Thanks for joining me and good luck!