How do you create a google group

Have you already used Google Groups? It’s a service focused on communication and collaboration, where you can create forums and emails. The main idea of this tool is to be a place where people can interact with others that share the same interests.  

According to Google, it’s a tool where “you can send an email to everyone in a group with one address, invite a group to an event, or share documents with a group. You can also create an online forum to discuss a popular technology or answer questions about a product”.

If you consider this tool for any of these purposes, spend a little time examining this guide to understand how Google Groups can be useful to your business.

What can you do with Google Groups? 

If you’re thinking about using Google Groups for your business, learn about its best use cases, and see if they fit your strategy.

Email list

You can use the email list on Groups to send newsletters to your clients or releases to the team. It’s a way to mass communicate with people and keep a relationship with the customers, partners, and providers.

Good examples of use cases for this use case are setting business meetings with your partners (via a partner @ Google Groups) or even releasing a new product to your clients (via a client@ Google Groups). 

Discussion Board

It’s the first reason why Google Groups was created, a web forum where the group members can interact. Usually is divided into topics, which made some teams adapt it for sharing tasks. In this kind of group, it’s possible to discuss the assignments for the whole team.

That’s why it is commonly used as a team chat, focused on discussing specific issues in separated threads.

Collaborative inbox

Google Groups was not designed to be a Shared Inbox, but many teams adapted to use it for this purpose.

The Google Collaborative Inbox consists of a group where people can send emails to an alias, and these emails are distributed to a team. For example, imagine customers sending emails to a Google Group “” asking for help. All of the people from your customer support team will receive these emails and will be able to reply to threads. 

This collaborative inbox is commonly used as a chatroom, where the team can communicate between themselves.

How to create a Google Groups account?

The first thing you should learn is how to create a Google Group. You need to be logged in to your Google account and then access the Google Groups site. Then follow our step by step of how to config your new account:

1. Click on the button “create a group” at the page’s header.

3. Configure the necessary permissions of your group: who can joy the group, view conversations, post, and view members. You can choose between:

• Owners
• Managers
• Members
• Entire Organization (that’s within your domain).

4. Add the Group members and managers. By default, you will be the Group owner, but it’s also possible to add others. Next, write a short welcome message to the group participants.

On this screen, you can also set the Preferences for receiving emails from the group. The options are:

• All email.
• Digest.
• Abridged.
• None.

Notice that you need to turn on conversation history for the group if you select the options abridged summaries or digest.

Moreover, you can decide between adding members to the group directly or inviting them to join. You can turn one of these options:

• Directly add members on: Specified users are added to the group with the subscription settings you select. Members can change their subscription settings later.
• Directly add members off: Specified users receive an email invitation to join the group. They’re added to the group only after they accept the invitation.

5. Click on the red button “Create” at the top of the page. Now, you’ve created your Google group.

What are the main Google Groups limitations?

Especially if you are considering using Google Groups as a shared inbox, you should know about its limitations. After all, the decision to share your company’s inbox must be well-thought-out because there is a lot at stake.

1. It’s not inside Gmail

If you like your Gmail inbox, we are sorry to disappoint you. You need to have a Google account to access and create your group, as you’ve already seen. Even so, your shared email won’t be inside Gmail but separated from it. A shared inbox inside Gmail may be a better idea to simplify your work. It can also help your team with the well-known user experience.

2. It can get messy

On Google Groups, everybody on the team receives the same emails simultaneously. It almost reaches the concept of a shared inbox. Yes, almost, because of a big problem with how this tool tries to do it. 

Google Groups works with the “one-to-many” model to share the email inbox. In practice, when a client sends a message to the team’s email address, everybody receives it, and each person can start a different thread with this same email.

So imagine that the whole team receives an email from a client complaining about something related to a product. One person sees it and starts a thread answering this email. Meanwhile, another two people had the same idea of replying to it. There is no way to know if the problem was solved.  Even if the person that answered CC the rest of the team, it won’t work. It’ll just generate lots of emails in everyone’s inboxes.

Two different people responding to the same email won’t do good for your company’s image nor reputation. It would be best to have an organized interface and software where you won’t have this issue.

Remember that Google Groups hasn’t been created for this specific purpose, just adapted by users. So you can understand why it doesn’t work very well.

3. You don’t have your own identity

If you don’t have a G Suite account, your Google Groups’ email domain will be @googlegroups.com. The email domain with your company’s name can help your clients have a better experience and a good impression of you. So before opting on using Groups, have in mind that you should acquire a domain on G Suite.

4. Tasks visibility

Google Groups doesn’t have the functionality that permits us to know who’s working on which task. So it’s possible that lots of misunderstandings can happen, as a job is done twice, by different team members, for instance.

5. Unknown sender

Since Google Groups doesn’t have appropriately shared inboxes and people, we need to forward each other inside the team all the time. Sometimes email threads get so long and confusing that people no longer realize who sent a specific reply to individual emails.

On the other hand, there are other software options like Drag. It allows you to keep everyone in the same conversation and assign a person to reply to specific emails. It keeps work simple, and no one will wonder who sent what.

What is the best Google Groups alternative?

If you didn’t like the cons we mentioned, you should look for an alternative that will certainly provide all you need. We present you Drag: an app that is far beyond a shared inbox. A complete solution for teams that want to integrate their communication through Gmail, managing tasks, 

A real shared inbox

Of course, if you are looking for a shared inbox tool, this is the first aspect we have to clarify. For people that don’t like the email interface on Google Groups, we have the solution: Drag works inside and is integrated with your Gmail account. 

Tasks in a Kanban mode

With Drag, you can organize your tasks on a Kanban board. It means you can see all of your tasks in cards, which makes organizing a to-do list a lot easier. Tracking down your progress becomes much better with this mode too. It’s also possible to use the Kanban mode for your emails to organize them in a way that better suits your necessities. 

• Delegation of tickets;
• Due dates;
• Checklists;
• Internal notes.
• Team chat
• Labels

More than just emails

Drag is so much more than just a place where you can receive and share emails with your team. It’s a platform developed to help you run your business and become a collaborative workspace inside Gmail to unify your processes in only one spot.

On Drag, you can set due dates, have an internal team chat, add tasks to your inbox. Creating checklists and notes and integrating Google Calendar and Gmail are also some other Drag functionalities.

Wrapping up

Yes, Google Groups is a useful tool for businesses, but it’s not being used in an optimized way by some teams. And by saying this, we mean that it wasn’t created for specific uses. That’s why it doesn’t work as expected.  It may lack important details that will make a massive difference in your work’s performance.

Drag is undoubtedly the best alternative to Google’s app since it offers the right solutions not only to your email management but to your business in general. 

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