In a previous article, we explored the benefits of becoming a premium email hosting provider, as well as the infrastructure requirements. In this article, we’ll continue the conversation from a business point of view and suggest what your business model should look like (more specifically, what kind of bundles you could come up with for your website).
Note: this business plan is just an example, and you can tweak it however you want so that it fits your current business the best. Schedule a meeting with an Axigen consultant, and we can discuss more options.
Finding Your Email Hosting Provider Niche
You might be asking yourself: “as a small hosting provider, why should I care about offering a separate email hosting service when there are giants on the market like Google or Microsoft”. And the answer is that these giants are bad at addressing niched needs. The reason for this is simple: they are addressing the masses because their objective is to capture the most number of users.
For example, there are customers on the market that are very concerned with where their data is being stored. Data territoriality is one of the main reasons many of our clients switch to Axigen, and you, as a smaller hosting provider, can take advantage of this opportunity and use it as a powerful differentiator (e.g., I’m a hosting provider from the United Arab Emirates and I guarantee that my clients’ data will never leave the UAE).
Another example can be language specificities. Axigen supports right-to-left languages (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew) in our premium WebMail, so if you’re a hosting provider from Israel, for example, you can use that as a differentiator for your customers.
You know your customers best and know what their needs and requirements are. Whatever matters most to them, you can use that as a differentiator for your email hosting service and plan your bundles accordingly.
In VentraIP’s case, they identified that their customers care most about storage:
If your differentiator is right-to-left writing support, you can also showcase what your webmail looks like on your website, along with some testimonials and an FAQ section.
How to Come Up with Email Bundles
Fortunately for you, Axigen offers incredible flexibility, so no matter what kind of packages you want to offer your customers, anything is possible. Here are some examples that prove Axigen’s flexibility:
- you can offer mailboxes with specific storage options (let’s say your client wants to buy 20 mailboxes of 5GB and 7 mailboxes of 50 GB)
- or you can offer a fixed size domain email hosting with a maximum number of mailboxes and let the administrator configure their mailboxes however they want.
Do you have something else in mind? Schedule a meeting with an Axigen consultant, and let us know how we can help you.
How to Charge Your Customers for Their Emails
The most popular options are:
- monthly subscription
- annual subscription (some providers even offer 1-2 months for free if the customer pays for a whole year)
- pay for what you use (for example, if the customer has a mailbox of 2GB storage, they will pay $3; if they want an additional 5GB of storage, they will pay $7, or some similar logic).
Note: how you choose to charge your customers is specific to each niche. As you know your customers best, you can choose whatever charging strategy you think will work best for them.
Promoting Your New Email Hosting Service
Choosing how to promote yourself as an email hosting provider depends on how you market your other services. Take into account that you already have a solid client base that you can start with. For example, you can start by emailing them and asking whether they would be interested in an email hosting service that hosts their data near their office / home.
If you’re in need of ideas, you can also check out our marketing plan for ISPs article.
Success Stories
We can’t emphasize this enough, but becoming an email hosting provider is a HUGE business opportunity. Think about it this way: your clients will buy mailboxes, and over time, their mailboxes will be filled with data. This will amplify your products’ stickiness and ensure they’ll remain your clients for a long time.
To throw some numbers into the mix, if you have 10.000 clients who use your email hosting service and charge each of them $2, that’s an extra $20.000 in revenue. And we didn’t even take into account the storage upgrades some of them might need.
There are many local success stories like this all over the world. Here are a few examples:
Axigen, Your Trusted Email Hosting Partner
If we’ve managed to convince you to offer a premium email hosting service as a separate product, Axigen is your perfect partner. We don’t just offer you a robust platform, but we also have your back in your day-to-day operations by offering you stellar support 24/7, thanks to our team members from all over the world.
Schedule a meeting, and let us know how we can help you.