Skip to content
Securing Your Email Marketing: Best Practices for Startups to Prevent Cyber Threats
Email marketing, in this digital world, is a low-cost channel that any start-up can use to build up a rapport with prospects, increase conversions, and retain activity. On the other side, with increasing importance, it furthers the need to secure your email marketing from any kind of digital fraudster. From phishing to data breaches, email marketing systems have turned out to be an ideal target for any cyber-criminal.
Therefore, the security of your email marketing campaign goes hand in glove with the protection of the brand image, customer trust, and integrity of the data.
This article looks at some of the ways one can have startups proactively take steps toward securing their email marketing campaigns and protecting themselves from cyber threats. We look at how phishing affects the success of a campaign, protection of data, and what happened in common breaches of email marketing platforms. Being that startups have smaller resources, not to mention constantly changed structures, caution is required because most hackers consider them easy targets.
Where Email Marketing and Cybersecurity Meets
Cybersecurity and email marketing can sound like two pretty different functions in context to business, but actually, it's a lot more interrelated than most people can imagine. The rise in phishing attacks, targeting both marketers and customers alike, with regard to email campaigns, can alone explain how these domains cross over.
Phishing attacks and e-mail campaigns
Besides this, phishing is actually the most common form of cyber-attack whereby fraudsters pretend to be trusted sources through email to pull out sensitive information. Such phishing attack campaigns will almost kill your email marketing campaigns by spoofing your company and tricking your recipients. This phishing does not just dent your credibility but brings about data breaches with a loss of reputation and loss of trust.
These are those that appear to be, say, promotional offer emails, which will eventually lead the recipients into disclosing their login credentials for what they perceive as a great deal from your startup. This would have severe repercussions, such as a sharp decline in customer activity, together with an increase in unsubscribe rates. Besides, phishing emails also impact your email deliverability in that, over time, ISPs flag your emails as spam, hence degrading your overall email performance.
You can mitigate these risks by educating your audience in the use of phishing email detection. Teach them always to verify any unsolicited communication prior to clicking any link or revealing sensitive information. Impose robust email authentication controls: DMARC, SPF, and DKIM prevent attackers from spoofing emails appearing to be from your company.
Data protection considering the email campaigns
Every email marketing campaign is an activity of collecting and managing rich customer data; very often, it is the first target of hackers. From emails with passwords to purchase history, it is the responsibility to take care of this kind of data: neither to lose customers' trust nor go into conflict with various privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA.
Use secure email marketing platforms:
Startups should be aware of those email marketing services that offer end-to-end encryption with strict data protection policies. Some of the better-known safe platforms for this are Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Sendinblue. Audit periodically the security practices and features of your email marketing service providers and shift towards the platforms fitting within the security needs of your startups.
Encrypt and Store Data Securely:
Always encrypt customer data, whether stored or transferred, to prevent unauthorized access by an intruder. Put differently, encryption makes data unreadable by attackers even if intercepted. Encryption practices on data should be in place right from subscription forms to CRM systems along the touchpoints of your e-mail marketing funnel.
Access Control:
Put in place strict access controls to ensure only a few people in your startup have access to customer data. Role-based access, whereby only the particular role that the employees play within the organization provides access, can prevent sensitive data from being misused or lost. Access to customer data should be confined to key personnel associated with email marketing and cybersecurity.
Better Segmentation for Security:
That is, to divide them into lists or sub-lists depending on certain characteristics of the same, such as purchase history or location. Even if this has the effect of making much more relevant campaigns, segmentation can also form part of your email marketing security.
Once your email list is segregated, you find it pretty easy to locate any abnormality or anomaly in some particular segment. Suppose your list has a particular segment showing an unusually high number of phishing complaints or unsubscribe rates; that may suggest that the particular segment is under a cybercriminal attack. You get the chance for early warning to take action immediately and swiftly, thus reducing the after-effects.
Moreover, list segmentation may allow the imposition of different securities since some of the lists contain sensitive information. For example, highly risky segments will deserve lots of care.
Breach Disclosure by Real-World E-mail Marketing Service Providers
Several companies can vouch for what happened when they did not secure their activities in e-marketing. The latest and most high-profile was Mailgun, the all-in-one email automation service, wherein 2020 hackers used a vulnerability in the API to siphon off critical customer data and email information from various firms using it to conduct email campaigns. This brought out in stark reality the fact that there is a need for not auditing third-party services and placed extremely robust cybersecurity measures on email marketing platforms.
Another good example is the SendGrid breach in 2015, where cyber thieves hijacked customer accounts and sent waves of phishing attacks. There has to be a reason to lock the account credentials with unique, strong passwords and 2FA.
Startups should learn from these. Always, it is advisable to choose those email marketing platforms that are transparent with information regarding their security practices and raise the bar on third-party vendors to that of your in-house systems.
Cybersecurity measures for email marketing
The following are some key considerations of cybersecurity that make email marketing safe for your startup.
1. Enable Two-Factor Authentication - 2FA:
This will add two-factor authenticity to the account of email marketing. With just simply having login credentials, in this case, the user will be asked to prove his identity with a second method like a text message or an authenticator which will reduce the associated risks with unauthorized access when login credentials are compromised.
2. Regular Security Audits and Monitoring:
Periodic auditing of your e-mail marketing campaigns and platforms for vulnerabilities to exploit-meaning updating your security protocols-may ensure continuous monitoring for real-time detection of any suspected activity or attempted breaches in time.
3. Consumer and Staff Training:
Cybersecurity is a team sport: Educate your team on password use, phishing email avoidance, and security best practices. Once more, help your customer base learn what to expect from marketing emails to become more aware of suspicious or phony emails that don't use your style of communication.
4. Backup your information:
Perform periodic backups of data from all clients, so that even when intruded upon, or in cases of system failure, you are not devoid of important information. Store these backups in an offsite, secure location that at least permits your startup to recover sooner from an attack, minimizing downtime.
5. Adoption of Email Anomaly Detection Tools:
Anomaly detection tool solutions track the pattern of email behavior and identify any deviation that signifies a cyber threat. This usually indicates extremely high bounce rates or any other unexpected spike in spam reports to flag an attack way in advance of any further escalation.
6. Use Antivirus Software for Endpoint Protection:
In the broader scope of digital protection, many startup founders often ask, "" when most of their operations run on cloud-based tools. While cloud platforms have inherent security, endpoint protection remains essential, especially when team members access email systems from personal or unsecured devices. According to insights from Cybernews, antivirus software forms a crucial part of a layered defense strategy — helping detect malware that could be leveraged in phishing attacks or data exfiltration via email.
Conclusion
Therefore, security in email marketing is very important for the protection of customer information, brand reputation, and generally, for the business success of a startup.
Cybersecurity applied to email marketing, therefore, needs the application of best practices that ensure safety through encryption, secure platforms, and education for both your team and audience.
With increased phishing and data breaches, proactive measures that will secure your email marketing campaigns are increasingly not optional but compulsive.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.