If you’re doing any type of email marketing, it’s important to know what email archiving is. It’s an integral part of the digital marketing sphere and, if used properly, can make your online promotion much easier to manage, organize and keep track of.

In its simplest explanation, email archiving is an add on to your digital marketing program that allows you and your contacts view archived versions of the marketing for up to a certain amount of emails and invitations. The amount accessible depends on the program you use. Generally, auto responder emails cannot be archived.

With many email archiving programs, it’s also possible to easily and quickly create web pages of the emails you’ve sent. It’s possible to create a customizable table of contents home page where archived emails can be quickly accessed with links on that home page.

Email archiving is becoming a more popular tool even with small- to mid-sized businesses. This is quite the change from the way this type of digital marketing accessory used to be used. It was once considered only something financial services and public made use of. As the years have gone by and email use has increased so have the methods of archiving those emails.

The reasons why more companies of all sizes are using email archiving are varied. Some use them to monitor employee communications. Others use this tool for disaster recovery. Still others are more interested in the storage aspect of the archiving tools and software.

If you’re considering whether to use emailarchiving, you need to ask yourself how this tool will benefit your business and if your business can afford to be without an archiving system. You might initially answer that there’s no big benefit to this type of software and that the costs are too expensive for the return on investment on the product. This may very well be true. But don’t make your decision until you’ve had a chance to fully look at all the benefits email archiving can provide.

There are a lot of benefits and some you may not have thought of. Some of the benefits are good for the company, but may not be very popular with the employees. But just because a program is unpopular does not necessarily mean it shouldn’t or can’t be used.

Monitoring Workplace Communications

This is a very useful benefit, but it may not win you any popularity contests with your employees. When using email archiving to monitor workplace communications, you need to keep the lines of communication open with your staff and explain to them the reasons why the monitoring is going on and that it’s not a representation of how your or the company feels about their honesty and work ethic.

Monitoring employee email is generally used in legal proceedings. It becomes legally beneficial when email evidence is required to provide proof of an employees’ violation of any of the company’s email policies or any other misuse of business email.

Email archiving for business email monitoring doesn’t mean you’ll be reading each and every one of your employee’s emails. It allows you to set the system up so the HR department (or other chosen department or individual) gets contacted any time an email with predetermined suspicious keywords are sent. Potentially suspicious keywords include “boss,” “meds,” “patient records,” “SSN,” “client file,” “career,” “job,” “resume,” or “easy money.”

The system will find these words in the subject line of the email, in the body and even in the attachments of emails. Since the offending words and email are immediately sent to the compliance officer (or comparable person), action can immediately be taken in the event of a violation.

To Free Up Digital Storage

Most employees nowadays use their business mailboxes as data storage filing cabinets. While it may be easy to access and find what you need, using data storage as filing cabinets takes up space on the email server. And space taken up means a slower system. And a slower system means decreased productivity which gets worse over time as employees store and search for larger amounts of data.

An archiving program ultimately saves the employee time by eliminating the need to delete past messages. It also frees up space on the email server which increases productivity and ultimately profits. Depending on the type of email archiving system you use, it’s possible to store the data in an off-site location accessible by any users with any Web browser connected to the Internet.

Data Preservation

We live in a digital age where a lot of even important communications are done online. Imagine the disaster that could happen if a system were to fail. All that important information would be lost forever leaving companies and employees to start from scratch again.

Technology, being what it is, has the potential to fail. Even the best systems and the most secure computers are vulnerable to damage from internal and external hazards. Most small to medium businesses know enough to back up their data on some sort of external storage device. But they may be surprised to discover that this may not be fully enough to get their businesses running to normal levels after a disaster.

Backing up information this way does preserve some email content in that accidentally deleted or destroyed records can be recovered. The unfortunate part is that not all data may be retrieved and the retrieved data may not meet archived data guidelines.

One example of this is that backed up data is not indexed like archived data would be. This can result in the time consuming and expensive process of trying to index and restore data.

Another downside to backed up data is that its integrity is not always consistent. If the backed-up source is older, information saved on it might be unreadable. Another point to keep in mind is that traditional back up procedures provides simply a snapshot of the captured data during a very small and very specific period of time. Anything that was generated after or between backups won’t be captured. Email archiving can solve these dilemmas.