Email Marketing and Cybersecurity: Protecting Your Campaigns and Subscribers

Email Marketing and Cybersecurity

Email marketing offers brands an effective way to engage with their audience and deliver targeted messages, but it also comes with significant security risks. Everything from phishing and spoofing to full-blown cyberattacks/data breaches can wreak havoc on good intentions and tarnish a brand’s reputation with its email list. Therefore, everything from cybersecurity breaches to safe measures of using/storing personally identifiable information (PII) must be considered for an email marketing campaign.

Yet even when this information is avoided, without it, there’s no promise that the intended recipient will receive the required inbox. If it goes to spam, the campaign was for naught. Thus, brands need certain safeguards to ensure success. One of them is Warmy.io. Warmy.io is an email warmup tool used by brands to control their sender reputation and email deliverability.

The Cybersecurity Challenges in Email Marketing

The biggest cybersecurity vulnerabilities with email marketing are phishing, email spoofing, and malware. Phishing is an attack in which criminals pose as a trusted brand and send nefarious emails, which could endanger a subscription base as they feel compromised.

However, it takes just one phishing email sent by a cyber criminal posing as a trusted brand to discredit that brand; instead, people are led to believe that the phishing email came from the legitimate brand when it did not. Email spoofing occurs when hackers change the sender’s email so that an email appears to come from one address when, in fact, it comes from another. 

This leads to unauthorized access to sensitive information or even identity theft. Similarly, malware is a virus or unwanted software that penetrates systems when subscribers provide sensitive information or when seemingly safe yet not links and attachments are opened.

For companies, a breach notification email means compromised data, fines from compliance regulators, and lost brand equity with their customer base. Acknowledging these issues is only part of the solution. The other part is effectively deploying resources to protect not only your email marketing initiatives but also your email recipients.

Protecting Subscriber Data

When someone trusts you enough to provide their personal information, including email addresses, you need to respect that information. Ensure transparency about how you collect, keep, and use subscribers’ information.

For instance, a privacy policy shows that you do your best to protect your subscribers’ information because you value it. Restrict the availability of sensitive information to the public facing your organization. Limit who can see and use your email list so that only those in your organization who need access have authorized access.

This is in conjunction with the backend access controls which prevent anyone from using your list without authorization. New vulnerabilities come to light every year. Safety policies should adjust every year; at a minimum, biannual adjustments will keep things safest.

In addition, create your email list using secure opt-in techniques. A double opt-in means that after someone subscribes to your email newsletter, they must verify their email address to join the list. This avoids accidental sign-ups that muddy your list and ensures that everyone on it truly wants to be there.

How to Recognize and Mitigate Phishing Risks

Perhaps the biggest threat associated with any type of email marketing is phishing. Phishing emails look like they’re coming from valid companies – but in reality, these illegitimate businesses send these fraudulent emails to either access your personal information or urge you to click on a link that will download malware to your device. You can combat phishing efforts through email authentication, and your subscribers need to know how to authenticate your emails.

Always include your logo and brand colors in every campaign so they become accustomed to your branding and teach them that there’s no reason to give personal or financial information via email. Constantly reinforce phishing awareness with your audiences. Occasional dissemination of the piece “Identifying Fake Emails” provides them with the means to spot a scam email, and the less they are duped, the better.

Email Deliverability and Its Link to Security

Deliverability is intertwined with security. For example, when a sender has a great sender reputation (that comes not only from sending honest emails but also from secure email campaigns), their email will for sure end up in an inbox and not flagged as spam. However, if the sender’s reputation is challenged due to a cybersecurity issue like spoofing it can land your emails in the spam folder or blacklist you from the desired inboxes.

Thus a solution that provides an email warmup like Warmy.io is necessary for guaranteed and sustained email deliverability. The warmup solution is a type of warmup that does it for you by creating positive engagement like fabricated email opens, email responses, and link clicks, so the business owner appears reputable and their email campaign ends up in the proper inbox instead of the spam folder.

The Importance of Subscriber Trust in Email Marketing

Email is all about trust. Yet when a negative breach of email security occurs phishing, spoofing, etc. Your subscribers are out for blood, and your brand feels it. It’s one thing to unsubscribe or report you, but so many people get so enraged or frightened that they threaten your brand with lawsuits. Thus, the only time you want to reach out for ethically and morally sound reasons is to ensure that such trust breaches do not happen preemptively.

For example, if you get hacked at your office and a data breach occurs, you must reach out to your subscribers. You must let them know what happened, what you’re doing to remedy the situation, and how they can protect themselves in the meantime.

This will save your image and subscribers’ faces and, ideally, save your image. Make them aware of your privacy policy. As long as subscribers know what you expect from them and what you’re doing to protect their information, communication is essential. If you communicate enough to satisfy yourself that they’re okay with hearing from you, you should be good to go.

Emerging Technologies for Email Security

Such armaments and innovations evolve as well as these cyberattacks. For instance, new software and innovations increasingly become the way to better email security. AI can identify abnormal activity almost instantaneously – detecting a phishing attack or breach of entry – which gives the company the upper hand to act fast. In addition, machine learning can deduce information based on behaviors over time.

Since these deductions can sift through large data sets, machine learning can identify potentially threatening situations before they’re even brought to light. Companies looking to safeguard their email efforts should employ such techniques to stay ahead of cyberattackers. In addition, there are attempts to use blockchain technology for email verification in the battle against spoofing. Such potential developments would revolutionize the future of email security.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the most successful, cost-effective ways for a company to connect with a targeted demographic, foster engagement and relationships, and promote conversion. However, it’s not without risk. Email marketing is susceptible to cybersecurity threats, such as phishing, spoofing, and data breaches, which can compromise an otherwise successful and perfected campaign. Therefore, such weaknesses must be addressed to protect a company’s brand image and the security and loyalty of its subscribers. 

Email marketing will remain safe and secure with growth potential as long as authentication, encryption, and supervision provide fail-safe security, and one’s own team and newsletter recipients are educated on possible cybersecurity risks. It’s just a matter of safety and security guaranteed. But at the same time, you won’t have effective campaigns either when your email deliverability is off.

The most secured emails won’t be effective if they’re not reaching the right inbox. That’s where email warmup services like the ones that Warmy.io provides come into play. Warmy.io boosts your sender reputation and interacts with email service providers to let them know you’re a real sender, so your secured campaigns function at full capacity. 

Email marketing would be futile without subscriber trust. Yet by attempting to be transparent, keeping leaked information otherwise, and conveying the purpose to change moving forward based on previous breaches, companies can foster and maintain such trust when battling cybersecurity blazes.

In addition, with emerging technologies like AI and blockchain, your cybersecurity solutions may be even more foolproof as you find ways to beat cybercriminals at their own game. Therefore, as the online world becomes more treacherous with potential email threats around every corner, the relationship between cybersecurity and email deliverability is critical. 

Companies prioritizing both not only protect their efforts but ensure what they should be receiving is received with properly convincing text and, ultimately, sustainability. Emails can be a steady form of communication; with the right techniques and programs, the fluctuating online world can become a consistent, reliable resource. Warmy.io.

Related Articles:

  1. Communicating Email Security Risks to Clients: A Guide for DMARC MSPs
  2. How Professional Email Marketing Software Enhances Personalization
  3. 7 Tips for Securing your Digital Communications: A Business Owner’s Guide
  4. Beyond the Inbox: Rising Phishing Attacks Across All Platforms
  5. Recovering from a Data Breach: Essential Steps for Businesses

Ashwin S

A cybersecurity enthusiast at heart with a passion for all things tech. Yet his creativity extends beyond the world of cybersecurity. With an innate love for design, he's always on the lookout for unique design concepts.