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Choosing the better email service provider between G suite vs Office 365 can be tough – since both platforms are pretty commonly used. According to the recent data by Statista, Gsuite is leading with 56.97% market share, followed by Office 365 with 42.63%.
Sales Professionals frequently use these email services to send cold emails and reach out to their prospects. Each of these have their own pros and cons that impact the productivity of sales reps. So throughout this article, we will compare G Suite vs Office 365 for their email outreach features. This guide will help you in deciding the best email client for your day-to-day sales outreach activities.
Email Sending Limit Comparison
Email sending limit is one of the most important things to be taken into consideration for sales outreach. If you exceed the email sending limits of your ESP, your emails will start to bounce and it will negatively impact your email deliverability.
G Suite claims to provide an email sending limit of 2000 emails per day. But according to various customer reviews, it’s closer to 1000 emails.
Similarly, with Office 365, you get an outlook email account that provides a sending limit of 10000 emails per day. But the actual sending limit is relatively lowered 2000 emails per day. Office 365 email accounts need warming up to prime them for sales outreach emails. However, Office 365 only takes as low as 4 weeks to warm up which enables you to start sending your outreach campaigns earlier. Outlook email accounts are also known for providing better email deliverability compared to G suite.
Disclaimer: The email sending limit varies for different accounts according to the user’s usage and the domain’s age. The older a domain, the quicker you’re able to send emails from a newly created email account with that domain. It’s recommended that domain should be at least 6 months old before sending email campaigns in volumes otherwise it may affect the domain reputation. To know your exact email sending limit, it is recommended to contact your ESP’s customer support.
Security Comparison
While talking to prospects and customers, you might occasionally share confidential material with them. So to ensure your sales communication is safe and secure, let’s explore each platform’s security features.
G Suite provides 2-factor authentication for sign-ins, making your account harder to be accessed by people other than you. Also, all shareable and non-sharable files are stored in a TLS encrypted format by default. Google claims that no one apart from your account administrators have the rights to any stored data in your account.
Microsoft Office 365 also provides a similar 2-factor authentication for signing-in. Encryption isn’t enabled by default, but can be set up to encrypt your files in TLS. The user can turn it on manually from the Options section of their Office Suite settings.
Hence both tools are equally good when it comes to safety features.
Features Comparison
G Suite Business Plus account comes with a dedicated 5 TB of storage. Along with that, it provides a secure Gmail account and documentation suite (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms). Additionally, G suite’s productivity suite includes Google calendar, Google Meet, Google chat, and Google Drive.
With Microsoft Office 365 Business premium account, you get a storage space of 1 TB. Apart from an Outlook email account for emailing needs, documentation apps like Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote are included. It also provides you with a dedicated Outlook Calendar, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive access for better productivity. The leading advantage of using Microsoft is the features that can be used both online and offline. G Suite features can only be used online. Both platforms can be integrated with each other via default options or external solutions. For example, you can link your Excel data to Google Sheets, sync information between email clients, and more.
Interface Comparison
Gmail for G Suite has a very clean interface with navigation to other tools accessible from every screen. Labelling feature helps the sales reps to segment the emails according to campaigns and pipeline stages. They can also store their collaterals in Google drive and share the link seamlessly via email. Other apps like Meet and Calendar are also well-synced with Gmail making it easy for meeting scheduling.
G Suite can be accessed from across all operating systems on desktops as well as mobile devices using native apps and web browsers. The only demerit with G Suite is it can be operated only when you are online.
Office 365 is a bit cluttered compared to G suite. Its Outlook email has different email folders for separating the emails, although it works similarly to labels in Gmail. Meetings can be directly scheduled from the Outlook calendar and they can be conducted over Microsoft Teams. Its Onedrive is functionally similar to Google Drive and is fairly easy to operate.
Office 365 can also be accessed from all the operating systems. It stays one step ahead of G Suite by providing offline use to apps on both desktops and mobile devices.
Pricing Comparison
Pricing is the most essential factor in choosing between G suite vs Office 365. And while deciding between a wholesome productivity suite, everyone has to give a second thought to the pricing. In this section, we will provide a detailed pricing comparison between G Suite vs Office 365
G Suite Pricing:
Apart from cloud storage capacity, we don’t see much difference in the pricing tiers on G Suite. All the 3 plans come with the complete productivity suite of apps (i.e. Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, and Drive) and Documentation (i.e. Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms). They also provide advanced security in all the 3 plans. You can’t record your meetings if you’re on a Business Starter plan, whereas it is available for Standard and Plus plan users.
If you are looking at G suite for your sales outreach, it’s best to go with the Business Starter plan as you get all the primary benefits at a relatively lower cost.
Office 365 Pricing:
Similarly, with Outlook 365, you get 3 plans with some difference in features. Unlike G Suite, Outlook 365 provides equal data storage to all the plans. But all the plans are well equipped with productivity apps (Outlook, Team, Calendar, and Onedrive ) and documentation (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote). Apart from basic features, the offline version of Outlook 365 is available only with Business Standard and Business Premium plans. The Business Premium plan is also equipped with Advanced Threat Protection that scans your emails for viruses and malware.
Similar to the Business starter plan on G suite, the Business basic plan is sufficient for your sales outreach needs in case you wish to go with Microsoft Office 365.
From the detailed comparison, we’ve discovered that sales reps can use both the tools for their outreach activities, as neither of them skips out on essential features. Email sending limits remain the same throughout different tiers, regardless of pricing in both G suite vs Office 365. Although Office 365 has a slight edge over G Suite by offering better deliverability on campaigns and higher daily sending limits.
In the next section, we will be providing some pro-tips that will provide super-powers to your G Suite or Office 365 account and make sure your outreach campaign gets the best results.
Tips for best email outreach with G Suite and Office 365
While both G Suite and Office 365 are feature rich, you might need to come up with ways to scale your sales outreach. After all, they weren’t built to be used for sending sales emails in mass volumes. If you send outreach campaigns (sequence) on a regular basis, it is recommended that you integrate your Outlook or Gmail account with Saleshandy.
Saleshandy is a cold email outreach platform that helps you in sending personalized outreach sequences with your G Suite or Office 365 account. Let’s explore how Saleshandy can augment your outreach operations with G suite and Office 365.
1. Warmup with Saleshandy
Using the Saleshandy warmup feature, you can automate this process. All you need to do is add your email account and activate the warmup. Saleshandy will start sending emails on your behalf and improve your domain reputation over a period of time.
Read More: How to Warm Up an Email Account Before Sending Cold Emails
2. Add multiple accounts with Saleshandy
Sending too many emails from one account might get your email account on a blacklist. Your IPs will also be part of these blacklists and will negatively affect your email deliverability. So, to avoid disrupting your outreach, you can add multiple email addresses to your Saleshandy account and continue sending emails without having to worry about these limitations.
When you add multiple email addresses to your Saleshandy account, you can divide your email list and send your sequences from different email accounts. Different email accounts will have different IP addresses which will keep your emails safe from blacklists.
Read More: What is Email Blacklist and how to avoid it?
3. Personalize your emails
Personalization helps you in getting better response rates and building domain reputation for your account.
If you schedule your email campaigns directly from G Suite or Office 365 account, you’d have to personalize these emails individually i.e. drafting separate emails for each recipient by yourself. Using Saleshandy to personalize your emails, you can add custom fields or content in each email using mail merge.
Non-personalized, standardized content usually goes into SPAM as it resembles promotional emails. And getting your emails marked/filtered into SPAM decreases your domain reputation, which in turn filters your emails into SPAM and promotions folders, where they’re least likely to be opened.
Similarly, ESPs can also detect when exact same emails are going out to multiple recipients, triggering their SPAM filters. The more personalized your emails are, the better your chances of getting responses.
4. Maintain time-gap between consecutive emails
Maintaining a time interval between two consecutive emails masks your outreach campaign (sequence) as normal and human instead of automated and promotional.
Sending too many emails at shorter intervals will trigger your ESP’s SPAM filters and will negatively impact your email deliverability.
Most of the email outreach tools send emails without adding these intervals.
Saleshandy maintains a time interval between each email to make it more natural and give you good email deliverability.
5. Build sender reputation
There are few more things that need to be taken care of while sending outreach emails. We need to maintain our domain and sender reputation, increase it with time to get the best results.
Keep the following in mind before your schedule your next cold email outreach campaign (sequence) –
- Always verify your email list before sending a cold email. If you send your emails to invalid email addresses, your sender reputation decreases and it can lead to suspension of your email account. Saleshandy verifies your list before sending your email campaigns (sequences) and gives you a clear list.
- While drafting an email copy, make sure to stay away from SPAM triggering words. Words like FREE!, OFFER and SALE! are considered spammy that will be flagged by your recipient’s SPAM content filter.
- Make sure you check your email sending limit with your ESP periodically. You should never exceed your email sending limit as it leads to email bounces. Frequent email bounces will decrease the credibility of your account and ultimately suspend your account permanently.
Learn more about Saleshandy here
Conclusion
It’s very important to choose the right email service provider for your sales outreach process. More so with productivity tools that help you overcome the limitations of these ESPs. Both G suite and Microsoft 365 work great with Saleshandy and generate great results. Saleshandy users are more likely to get better results in terms of email deliverability and open rates on their email outreach.
