Backup, Backup, Backup!
December 10th, 2009 by Melissa Webb
Everyone purchases insurance to safeguard themselves against the great Unknown, against what might happen to them one day. But there is one thing that I can guarantee is likely to happen to each and every individual reading this, and you likely don‘t have a safeguard in place against it. No matter how safe you think you are, no matter what protection you think you have to keep this from happening, one day – one day - your email will fail you. I’ve seen it happen dozens, nay, hundreds of times. It doesn’t matter what kind of email you have, public or private; at one time or another they all will stop delivering your valuable emails to you. On September 1st, Google’s Gmail suffered an almost 2 hour system-wide outage due to simple system upgrades.
This is why it is so vital for business users to adopt backup practices for their email accounts. A missed email from a friend is an inconvenience, but if you currently purchase leads from a company like InsureMe, that’s a missed business transaction, and plain old money down the drain.
Fortunately, all is not lost. Though we can’t prevent these outages from occurring, we can take out our own personal insurance against them. One way to protect yourself is to always have a secondary email address on file with anyone you do business with (banks, credit cards, etc.) Companies like InsureMe will happily forward your leads to multiple email addresses at no additional cost. Yes, you might end up just deleting the duplicate lead unless there is an issue, but wouldn’t you rather pay for the lead once and have the assurance that you’re always receiving it than end up paying for a lead you didn’t receive because your email is unreliable? Remember that if you decide to create a backup email that it should exist on a different server. For example, I have one Hotmail and one Gmail email account. If you haven’t had a chance to get around to that backup email yet and your email does crash, don’t worry! InsureMe has created some extra protection for you: you can also access all of your leads real-time (i.e. hot off the press) by using Agent Connection, located in your InsureMe account, which will deliver your leads to your desktop similar to email. To access Agent Connection, you simply need to log into your InsureMe account, no installing, no extra sign ups required. So while we keep our fingers crossed that it isn’t our email that stops working next time, do yourself a favor and give yourself a little extra insurance.
