Why you should offer low-cost email as a value-added service

If you run a web hosting company, e-commerce solution, or website builder, you probably know how important it is to offer a complete package to your customers. As a one-stop shop, you can streamline the user experience, increase customer loyalty, and decrease the odds that your customers will buy from one of your competitors.

One essential value-added service you should consider is email. By reselling custom business email, you’ll provide a service that likely all your customers need, while avoiding the upfront and ongoing operational costs of running an in-house solution.

Here are nine great reasons to offer OpenSRS email to your customers:

1. Offering email strengthens your value prop and boosts customer stickiness

Whether you’re upselling, cross-selling, or motivating a first-time buyer, you need to present customers with solutions they need at a price point they like. In this regard, email is an easy win. SMBs and entrepreneurs alike need an email that looks professional. And, at $0.50 a month per mailbox, you can easily integrate OpenSRS email into your existing bundles or offer it as a free but valuable add-on alongside other services.

Email is also a particularly sticky service. Most of us know this from experience. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it service for most users; once someone picks a provider and email address they are likely to stick with both.

2. It’s easy to bundle because it’s low-cost

Many of our reseller partners choose not to monetize email. Instead, they effectively give it away for free as part of a bundle. For many hosting companies, website builders, and business solutions providers, $6 a year (the annual cost of a 5GB mailbox) is a drop in the bucket against their average customer lifetime value.

3. A branded email helps your customers build trust and credibility

A custom email address helps your customers solidify their brand as a legitimate business. In fact, in a recent study by Verisign that surveyed 5,450 online consumers in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, “85% of respondents agreed that a business with a branded email address is more credible than one that uses a free email account.” The same respondents were also “more likely to have used a business’s branded email address (67%), than the telephone (56%) or social media (40%), to communicate with a business during the prior 12 months.”

The takeaway? Email is important. Consumers are savvy, and hello@mybusiness.tld looks a lot more legitimate than a random gmail or outlook address, which can be a red flag to potential buyers.

This makes email easy to market. You’re providing new solopreneurs and business owners a quick and low-cost means to boost credibility and further legitimize their business.

4. It’s affordable for small-business customers, but supports the needs of larger ones

The OpenSRS email solution costs a lot less than comparable alternatives. It doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles included in popular solutions like Google Workspace but, for the average small business, this can be a positive. They get a secure, reliable, custom email without having to pay for features they just don’t need. And the price difference is meaningful. As an OpenSRS reseller, you pay $0.50 per 5 GB mailbox per month. Compare this to Google Workspace, which costs a minimum of $6.00 per month.

With OpenSRS, power users will benefit from flexible storage sizes (set by you) all the way up to 100 GB, and all customers can count on a fast, secure, and dependable service that’s used by millions.

5. Integration and management is easy

If you’re already an OpenSRS reseller, you can provision and manage individual mailboxes and your overall email service settings through your existing account. For a no-upfront-work integration, you can provision mailboxes within the control panel. If you want to create an absolutely seamless email signup process right from your website or portal, you’ll want to use our email API to automate the process.

You can also designate "company admins” to provide certain customer accounts with full rights to manage the settings of all mailboxes within their organization. This lets your customers take control of their organization’s email administration, saving you time and support calls.

6. It provides a great user experience - one that reflects your branding

Your customers can access their email through a modern, mobile-friendly webmail, branded with your logo and colours, or through their preferred mail client (Outlook, Mac Mail, etc.). OpenSRS has step-by-step end-user guides for all popular mail clients, and tons of webmail resources. We also support customers around the globe by offering a webmail in 13 languages, including French, Spanish, German, Brazilian, and Portuguese.

As important, branding and customizing your email service is easy. We offer a comprehensive guide here. We provide HTML/CSS editing capabilities, so you can brand your login page(s) and the webmail interface itself. Additionally, you can use a custom hostname and install an SSL certificate on our platform. In short, to your customers, it’s your email solution; OpensSRS remains invisible in the background.

Finally, you can tailor your email solution’s feature set based on your customers specific needs and your preferred pricing model. For example, you could choose to enable products and features such as file hosting, rss, calendar, forwarding, and DAV access for business customers.

You can also get very granular with your customizations. You can set a default feature set for all mailboxes within a single organization or at the domain level, but you can also customize individual mailboxes as needed. With the flexibility to customize which features you offer and to whom, you can support your customers as they grow, and even save the day with a custom solution that is truly made just for them.

7. OpenSRS takes security and privacy seriously

Consumers are increasingly concerned with security and privacy. Offering strong mailbox password requirements and optional two-factor authentication helps ensure the security of your customers’ mailboxes and the reputation of your platform. We’re set up with both of these— two-factor auth is optional—and we also have a 24x7 in-house abuse team to ensure that your customers' email is safe and secure. With OpenSRS, abuse is blocked by multiple layers of defense at the network and application level. And we’re up to date on all security and privacy standards, including PCI, SOC2, and GDPR.

8. OpenSRS offers free, 24x7 support

Your business depends on ours. With that in mind, we offer all of our partners free, 24x7 support from a team of technical experts with the skills, tools, and permissions (read: no annoying phone trees or transfers) to help you out. If you run into trouble you can contact us via text, email, phone, or live chat at any time.

9. Email will help you attract small businesses and upsell as they grow

Running a profitable business is all about meeting your customers’ needs, and these change. If you primarily support small business customers (say 1-10 employees), they might not be looking for collaboration tools and chat functionality from their email provider. A lot of these extra features go unused by small businesses, and because they are so price-sensitive, they often find cheaper, leaner alternatives appealing.

As the customer’s business grows, however, a more robust solution may become necessary. For this reason, we often recommend OpenSRS email as the sole solution for our resellers who serve small businesses exclusively; for those who support small and medium businesses, we recommend offering both OpenSRS email and an enterprise-level service such as Google Workspace/Office 365.

Here’s a helpful summary:

How to choose: OpenSRS email vs. Google Workspace and Office 365

An easy way to see the value that a solution like OpenSRS offers your small business clients (and you as a reseller) is through a comparison between us and the leading alternatives: Google Workspace and Office 365.

OpenSRS has over 20 years of experience providing wholesale management services, and since its launch in 2003, our email solution has grown to support thousands of organizations and millions of end-users. We focused on developing an affordable solution for price-conscious customers that still delivers on the essentials: reliability, scalability, security, and great customer support. By working with us, you aren’t simply choosing a vendor; you are choosing a partner who will be there to help you every step of the way. Email is one of OpenSRS’ core products— one which we continually reinvest in and improve.