Have you ever looked at your monthly statement and seen a number of $9.99 charges? I know I have a number of them for services like Dropbox.com, Google Storage, Netflix, etc.

Personally, these are pretty common. But, start a website of your own and these accounts and service charges can multiply pretty quickly.

One common culprit of wasted monthly service charges is Google’s email service “for business” called G Suite.

What is G Suite?

G Suite allows you to create an email address for a domain name that you own.

For example, if you registered a domain name like Apple.com (we all wish we registered that one), then you could create your own email address for that domain like adam@apple.com. To do this, G Suite is one of the easier, more powerful, solutions out there.

I believe the way Google examples it is “Gmail for Businesses.”

Gmail is free and G Suite isn’t; costing you $5 per account.

An account could be defined as an email address that you set up. For example, adam@apple.com would cost $5 a month. Info@apple.com would cost $5 extra a month. Contact@, $5 a month, etc.

Now, let’s say you have Sarah, Mike and Jeremy that need their own account for the @apple.com business, each of those is also $5 a month.

Let’s total all that up:

  • info@ – $5/mo
  • Contact@ – $5/mo
  • Sarah@ – $5/mo
  • Mike@ – $5/mo
  • Jeremy@ – $5/mo
  • Pretty quickly you can be spending $25 a month.

What I usually do when I see that people want to use G Suite is that I ask someone how many accounts do you actually need.

Do you actually need an info@ account? Do you actually need a contact@ account?

Or, could info@ and contact@ go to the same account?

Do you actually need an email address for Sarah, Mike and Jeremy?

Or, could they all just use one account as support team members?

In most cases, the answer to these questions is NO.

But, what many people don’t know is that you can use some workarounds to create “shared accounts” that will serve more than one purpose (or, catch more than one email address).

What is a shared account?

Have you ever emailed someone at “support@website.com” and then gotten a response from one person? Then, when that person went home, had another person handle your request?

Sure!

This is quite common because companies that are customer focused to want to allow a team member to pick up where one has left off.

So, why not create the same thing?

Have one account called support@ that collects inbound emails for sarah@, mike@, jeremy@, info@ and contact@.

Then, if Sarah is sick, Mike can read any emails that she was working on.

The problem:

G Suite accounts cost $5-10 a month each

The solution:

  1. Decide which people in an organization need their own email account
  2. For support members or marketing email addresses, create “shared accounts.”
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Things to keep in mind:

  1. Decide what email address (or G Suite account) you want to be your “command central.” This could be called support@, team@, etc.
  2. Create domain routing rules. Here is the direct link to use after you have signed into your account to find “domain rules:” https://admin.google.com/AdminHome?fral=1#AppDetails:service=email&flyout=default_routing
  3. Begin your email migration. To find this link, you can type “migrations” into the G Suite search bar or use this link (just change YOURDOMAIN.COM to the one you use) https://admin.google.com/YOURDOMAIN.COM/AdminHome?hl=en#ServiceSettings/service=email&subtab=domaindefault I ran into some hurdles here because to migrate email you need to 1) be a super admin 2) create 2-step app passwords for each account that you are moving 3) I ran into a bug and had to migrate each account on by one. If you don’t set up a 2-step app password you will see error messages that say “we can not pass go,” from Google.
  4. Make sure that all the “services” that are attached to these accounts are moved. For example, YouTube is often connected to an email address (Gmail or G Suite). So, you will want to change the owner of this account before you delete the one it is connected to. The other account that most people use is Google Drive Docs or Sheets. These should all be moved to the new account.
  5. In the new “central command” account (I call this “team@”) you can create the ability to send and receive from other email accounts. The best way I have found to make this work is to create automatic filters and direct those messages to a label. This way you can easily identify what email you want to read.
  6. To make this all work on the go, download the Gmail app for iPhone or Android so that you can have access to the “send from” option. This won’t work with the regular Apple Mail or default Android app.
  7. After you have verified that everything got migrated, go ahead and delete all the extra accounts that you aren’t in real need of.
  8. (Optional) Some things to keep in mind, if you want to add a little extra protection to your “shared email” account, you can set up account delegation. This way, someone won’t be able to change the username and password of this account without your permission.

This might seem like a number of steps to take, but the benefits outway them. Having the ability to have multiple people have eyes on a customers email is crucial. Especially since we are in a time where people “want it now.”