Email Security: What Marketers Need to Know

Did you know that, according to Earthweb, there are over 333 billion emails sent daily? This means that there are around 3.5 million of them being sent every second. Additionally, 99% of users of email check their inbox once every day, at least.

Considering these statistics, it’s no surprise that so many people are now using email marketing. However, for email marketers for yourself, you might be nervous about email security.

After all, marketing emails can be easily targeted by cybercriminals because they know you’re looking for a way to make money from sales.

Fortunately, in this article, we’ll review everything you need to know about email security.

Finally, you can ensure that you use email for your business while ensuring everything you do is secure, protecting your business in the process. Read on to learn more.

Email Security Threats

When it comes to email marketing and security, there are different email security threats that can potentially be harmful to you or your customers. These include spoofs, scams, phishing, and malware. We’ll review each of these in detail now.

Spoofs

Spoofs are a threat to your email security. These are forgery emails that cybercriminals create that make it seem like the emails have been sent from a brand or company instead of them. Sometimes, cybercriminals might actually be able to pull off faking a business’s brand.

They might go so far that they end up creating a landing page that looks exactly like the one a company uses.

The reason cybercriminals create this type of fake email or landing page is that they can use it in order to get access to payment information and login credentials.

This type of security threat can be quite damaging to your brand’s reputation. After all, customers might start to associate your business with cybercrime or cybercriminals.

Scams

Email scams are one of the most common types of email threats. They’re so common, in fact, that many emails will block these types of emails. Unfortunately, this means that emails that seem like scams are also going to end up blocked or in the spam folder.

So how do you ensure that this doesn’t happen to the emails that you send out as part of your marketing campaign?

You need to take all the necessary steps to make sure that your business’s emails are relevant and authentic, as much as they can possibly be.

Use your customers’ personal names when you email them and find other strategies for establishing bonds with them.

In addition to ensuring that your emails aren’t confused for spam in your customers’ inboxes, you also have to ensure that you don’t end up being scammed by replies to the emails you send out for your marketing campaigns.

Cybercriminals will often take over email accounts and then send scams from those emails. Watch out for signs of this and do what you can to prevent it from occurring so you don’t receive scams as replies.

Phishing

When phishing attacks occur, they can hurt consumers. When it comes to social engineering techniques that are intelligent, victims can often fall for them. These make it possible for cybercriminals to steal financial and personal data belonging to consumers.

These attacks, unfortunately, can also negatively impact businesses.

How does this happen? Cybercriminals will pretend to be a customer or another type of interest party. Then, they’ll slowly learn information, for example, answers to the business’s account recovery questions.

Once they have this type of information, they’ll be able to disrupt the functioning of the business.

In a worst-case scenario, these cybercriminals could impersonate credit card companies or corporate banks.

With this information, they would be able to defraud both a business and any of the customers on the business’s email marketing list.

Malware

Different malware types include ransomware, keyloggers, adware, and spyware. Different malware types can shut down a business’s marketing campaign. So be careful. Hackers know exactly what they need to do to trick people into downloading their malware.

All it takes is a link or a download that seems like it’s harmless. It isn’t, so watch out for anything of this type!

How to Protect Your Company and Email Campaigns

Now that we’ve reviewed the different types of security threats there are, we’ll get into how you can protect your company and email campaigns. This includes strategies such as verifying your email list, encrypting emails, and more.

Verifying Your Email List

Verifying your email list is an essential part of business and email campaign protection. To get started, make sure that you focus less on having an expansive list than having one that has high-quality contacts on it.

Additionally, review your list to ensure that every person on it is someone who signed up.

Keep in mind too that inactive accounts will often be a big target hackers focus on.

Once they have access to the inactive account, they’ll use it as a place where they base their operations as they carry out a great variety of cybercrimes.

By verifying your email list, you can ensure that everyone on your list is an active email user, making it less likely that you’ll have a cybercriminal on your email list.

Encrypting Emails

Email encryption is another way to protect your company and email campaigns. This is important because businesses such as yours will send emails that have sensitive customer information in them often.

These might include information such as credit cards’ last four digits, phone numbers, and addresses.

For this reason, it’s important that use encryption to secure the emails you send to customers.

Utilize a VPN

With a virtual private network, or VPN you can protect the emails you send while they travel through the online world. Hackers won’t be able to gain access, making your email security and privacy greater than ever.

Need More Information?

Now that you’ve learned everything you need to know about email security as a marketer, you might need more information. Maybe you want to learn more about how to use these protection methods or you want help with your email marketing generally.

Whatever information you need, we can help. At VerticalResponse, we’re experts when it comes to email marketing and security.

Additionally, we have an email marketing software you can use. To learn more about this solution, get more information now.

© 2022, Chris Duncan. All rights reserved.