Social media might get the lion’s share of attention nowadays, but email is still the best tool for nurturing prospects into loyal brand lovers for online businesses. Despite this, any online marketing success is rarely without downsides, including email marketing. If not protected well enough, cybercriminals find easy ways to exploit your carefully crafted email campaigns for their own ends.
But what are the specific consequences of neglecting cybersecurity in your email marketing efforts, and how can you protect them? Here’s our thorough breakdown.
How Do Cyberattacks Impact Email Marketing?
The data involved in successful email marketing is significant in both volume and type, and this makes them an attractive target for cyberattacks. So, the stakes are high, as a single breach can reveal thousands of legitimate email addresses, not to mention associated customers’ private and financial data, purchase histories, account details, and more.
Cybercriminals can extract this data and either sell it or use it for identity theft. This becomes even more concerning as customers often reuse passwords across accounts created on your website and others. As a result, other accounts may also be at risk if hackers try to access them with stolen passwords.
The consequences of data breaches regarding client data are incredibly challenging to recover from, especially for smaller businesses. Implementing proper security, paying for damages, and the downtime you suffer while addressing the situation incur high financial losses. Your reputation may also suffer an irreparable blow. Plus, you’ll violate industry standards and laws governing safe data handling and storage practices.
If that’s not clear enough, prioritizing strong cybersecurity across all areas of marketing is essential—starting with email marketing, as it handles a significant amount of sensitive data.
Securing Your Email Marketing Activities
The worst-case scenario becomes much less likely if you implement strong email marketing practices that integrate cybersecurity measures at every stage of campaign creation and execution.
1. Raise cybersecurity awareness among your team
Humans are the most vulnerable factor in cybersecurity, so most hackers concentrate on exploiting them. A single phishing email supposedly sent by your email marketing platform can convince an unaware team member to expose their login credentials on a fake website.
This gives hackers access to the platform, your mailing lists, and data from tools like CRMs that the platform synergizes with. To prevent this from happening, you must ensure everyone on your team is well aware of core cybersecurity competencies and able to identify and sidestep threats.
To further minimize the risk of employees receiving targeted phishing emails, encourage them to use data removal services. These tools erase sensitive personal information from data broker sites, reducing the amount of publicly available data that cybercriminals can exploit for social engineering attacks.
The best data removal services provide continuous monitoring and automatic removal of exposed data because new information is constantly being collected and sold online. Without ongoing protection, employees’ details could reappear, making them vulnerable again. So, look for services that offer real-time alerts and regular scans to ensure that sensitive information stays out of hackers’ reach.
2. Choose the right providers
Which email provider and email marketing platforms you use can significantly impact your digital safety and that of your subscribers.
Combining a reputable email provider with a secure email gateway provides extensive protection for incoming messages. These solutions include antispam measures that minimize unwanted emails while scanning for phishing attempts and malicious links.
On the other hand, email platforms focus on bulk messaging and subscriber protection. They use protocols like TLS to send encrypted emails, protecting their contents from man-in-the-middle attacks. Moreover, platforms extensively support measures like SPF, DKIM, and DMARK that authenticate your emails, which helps prevent spoofing and phishing attacks targeting your subscribers.
3. Secure password use
A lot goes into crafting the perfect marketing email, from using reliable email marketing tools for design and grammar checking to selecting the right platform for sending it. All these tools and services require user accounts, which are only secure if the passwords you associate with them resist compromise.
If creating them yourself sounds like a hassle, a business password manager can be an invaluable security tool to consider. Password managers streamline complex password creation and their safe storage. If every marketing team member uses unique passwords backed by two-factor authentication, which a password manager also provides, the chances of account compromise and takeover drop significantly.
4. Validate your content
Not all cyberattacks on email marketing campaigns are obvious or easy to spot. For example, the attacker might gain access to your email platform account and subtly manipulate existing campaigns by exchanging legitimate links for malicious ones. Moreover, third-party sites, like the service that hosts images or email templates, can be hacked. The hackers can then modify the assets you use with malicious code.
Thoroughly scan every email for suspicious links and compromised assets before sending it to your customers. Periodically test emails to see how recipients experience them. That, plus regular email list pruning, will help your legitimate marketing emails avoid getting flagged as spam.
5. Securely access email marketing assets
Marketers don’t need to be present in a physical office and can even embrace the digital nomad lifestyle. While liberating, this greatly increases their chances of encountering and using unsafe networks like public Wi-Fi. Accessing your email marketing platform and other company assets through such networks leaves you open to illicit monitoring and credential theft that can quickly spiral into a data breach.
To prevent this, employees should always activate a VPN before accessing online business accounts or files. A VPN client enhances security by blocking phishing attempts, malware, and trackers while masking IP addresses and securing access to company data. Make this a routine practice for your team to reinforce cybersecurity habits, especially for those who work remotely.
Conclusion
Email marketing works. It’s cost-effective, builds customer rapport, and contributes invaluable insights that fuel even more successful future campaigns. Realizing what’s at stake and implementing the measures we mentioned above will help grow your brand’s trustworthiness while protecting your online business and customers alike from cyber threats.
