Email remains a trusted, versatile, and bountiful marketing channel companies and customers continue to rely on. Marketers who make it their bread and butter concern themselves with eye-catching subject lines and optimum click-through rates. You must ensure that your message is delivered safely. On top of that, interacting with it shouldn’t put recipients at risk. This is where cybersecurity email marketing tools come in.
This article offers an overview of cybersecurity in email marketing. It briefly explains why responsible marketing is impossible without reliable cybersecurity backing. We also introduce high-impact tools that ensure safety, reputation, and compliance.
Why is Cybersecurity Essential for Email Marketing?
Data and audience protection are the two primary reasons why any email marketing efforts need to be backed up by robust cybersecurity.
On the one hand, email marketing hinges on collecting prospect and customer data. In fact, it’s often sensitive and can include payment data, SSNs, and more. Restricted, secure access to email marketing platforms and associated databases makes them resistant to data breaches. In turn, this not only cause great financial burden but come with reputation and trust loss that are challenging to recover from.
On the other hand, mishandling email address security can pose a direct danger to recipients. For example, a compromised email account may let hackers use a previously legitimate, trusted address to send spam. The goal is to conduct phishing attacks, and spread malware. Having proper measures in place will prevent this.
Finally, taking cybersecurity seriously is a prerequisite to not finding yourself in violation of industry standards and laws. For example, any company that sends marketing emails to customers in Europe needs to comply with the GDPR. This means they must inform recipients of their data-gathering practices and provide actionable ways of opting out. Not adhering to the standards laid out in this law, or the CCPA and CAN-SPAM if you’re dealing exclusively with an American audience, brings harsh penalties.
Which Cybersecurity Tools Should Email Marketers Use?
You can successfully safeguard your data, customers, and reputation by employing the following security tools.
SEG
A Secure Email Gateway (SEG) is a comprehensive tool for securing, controlling, and authenticating outgoing and incoming email traffic. It incorporates several protective measures, such as a firewall, authentication protocols, spam and phishing filtering, and content scanning.
SEG offers two-way protection. The firewall and anti-phishing features ensure you don’t come into contact with dangerous websites. Malware protection can scan attachments for malicious programs.
Moreover, the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols ensure that no one can send emails to your contacts from your company servers without authentication. This prevents your emails from becoming malicious by preventing spoofing.
Password managers
The data-intensive nature of email marketing campaigns makes securing marketing platforms, customer databases, and other repositories a top priority. Associated accounts can be at significant risk if their passwords are easy to guess or the same for several accounts, some of which could have been revealed in previous breaches.
The best way to mitigate these concerns is to set up a highly-regarded business password manager. The manager can supply each team member with unique login credentials for any number of accounts and store them in encrypted vaults and other sensitive data. Members can securely and automatically fill out their credentials, sync them across devices, or temporarily share them.
Multi-factor authentication
MFA complements password management and is an essential safeguard. Whereas password managers ensure all credentials are unique and impossible to brute-force, MFA keeps them from being compromised should cyber crooks access them by other means. MFA uses either codes sent to your smartphone or biometrics to allow account access from previously unregistered locations.
Encryption
Follow-up emails can contain a wealth of personally identifiable information, including billing data and information on specific orders. Email encryption tools or services jumble up the contents, making them unreadable for anyone but the recipient. That doesn’t prevent someone from intercepting the correspondence, but it does ensure they’re getting no usable information out of it.
VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is essential for email marketers— it encrypts internet connections. This allows sensitive customer data to be protected from unauthorized access, especially when using public Wi-Fi or remote networks. The best VPNs protect against cyber threats like phishing attacks and ensure that your communications and data remain secure, as well as private.
A patch management tool
Unpatched vulnerabilities in operating systems, software, and applications are among the most common and efficient means of gaining unauthorized system and data access. Enforcing regular updates for all company devices is paramount but impractical unless you use a patch management tool. It monitors update availability and deploys the latest versions automatically to all devices connected to your network.
Cybersecurity awareness training
The email marketing safeguards you implement will only be effective if the humans that benefit from them don’t themselves fall victim to fraud, scams, and data theft. Investing in continued cybersecurity training may be your most impactful move, as it will greatly reduce the harm the unpredictable human factor can introduce into your cybersecurity equation.
Training can encompass a wide array of subjects ranging from basics like password hygiene through phishing detection to optimal incident response strategies. Team members may also benefit from data removal services which will positively impact their online security. These specialize in thoroughly eliminating unwanted and potentially compromising private data from the internet, even if it’s possessed by third parties.
Keeping up with developments in the digital threat landscape and introducing new mitigation strategies as they become available is a cornerstone of long-term cyber resilience.
Conclusion
Email marketing is all about nurturing customer relationships, so ensuring that every interaction between them and your brand is as secure as it is welcoming creates positive experiences for everyone involved. Add the tools recommended above to your marketing arsenal to have another compelling reason for customers to place their trust in you.