Email is such a fundamental part of business that any failure in the system would cause a loss of income for one in every five companies. That’s one of the stark findings of a new survey from Neverfail. In a study of over 200 companies, the business continuity firm found that 19% of IT managers said that their organisations would suffer financially if the email system was out of action. One in every four businesses said they would have reduced employee productivity if the email systems failed. Amazingly, one in every 17 companies in the survey would be unable to meet regulatory compliance in their sector if the email system crashed.

These figures show just how important email has become to any business. How much of your day is spent on emails and other forms of electronic messaging, such as Twitter, Instant Messages, Facebook pokes and so on?

Apparently, 58% of us handle emails every day. And considering there are over 1.2billion email users, that’s an awful lot of email messages whizzing around the planet.

But what would happen if your email system froze, collapsed, hit the carpet? You might think you would cope, for instance, being able to send emails from a webmail account, or signing up quickly with GMail or Yahoo!Mail. However, you would certainly lose productive time working. Plus you would lose image and reputation to some degree.

Clearly having backup systems in place is vital. If you can’t afford the services of business continuity experts, then the least you should do is have two main email accounts using different hosting companies, based on different servers. That way if one goes bust, breaks, or otherwise causes you problems you can use the other one straight away. Having one hosting company who deals with all your web sites, domain names and email is simply too high a risk to take for a small business.

Also, remember that email marketing will bring you more money than web marketing. The highest return on investment in any online marketing comes from email.  Repeated studies have shown this. Plus, recent research suggests that people are buying even more from email now, in spite of the recession.

So, email is your most important tool in the online business world. It might be inconvenient without it and you might be unproductive for a day or two until any failure is sorted. But with email marketing being so valuable to you, any problems with your email system could significantly affect your income too.

Time to get your email system sorted..!

If you run a small business and want to protect yourself from potential email system failures, my report on How to Set Up An Email System is available to download. Just click the link below.