Email Marketing Security Mistakes to Watch Out For

Email marketing is a long-standing and still highly effective means of engagement, bringing insights, value, and product awareness to genuinely interested audiences. Content strategies and ROI projections tend to dominate related discussions. However, neglecting email marketing workflow security can have far more serious consequences.

This article focuses on four core security mistakes even experienced email marketing professionals may commit. More importantly, it offers actionable advice on preventing and mitigating them.

Common Cybersecurity Mistakes Marketers Make

In general, danger to marketing campaigns and the data they contain stems from insufficiently secure workflows. The shortcomings can either come from marketers’ lack of training and awareness, or they can be inherent to the tools and processes marketers depend on. These are the most common ones.

Falling for phishing scams

Marketers have access to data on potentially thousands of clients. This includes personal, financial, and contact information as well as purchasing habits. They also tend to use widely available marketing tools. Attackers use this in creating engaging – and highly effective – phishing scams.

A marketer might receive an email that looks like it’s from such a tool’s development team. The email points to a problem in an urgent tone – an active campaign has supposedly encountered a problem, or your subscription is about to expire. Recipients are often provided with an attachment or link along with the email. Interacting with them either installs malware onto the device or leads to fake capture portals that harvest their account credentials.

Weak passwords

The average marketer uses at least twelve tools to handle various aspects of their job. Each tool needs an account, which is secured by login credentials consisting of a username and password. Since keeping track of distinct passwords takes more mental effort than most people think is worth it, they’ll resort to something that’s easy to remember or reuse the same password.

This is harmful in two ways. First, passwords that are common and easy to remember are also remarkably easy to crack. Second, once a password is known to be valid for one account, attackers can try to gain access to other tools and platforms with it and its variations.

Poor list management

Uncurated lists, especially if they’re bought online and not grown organically, can become a cause of trust issues and weaken email marketers’ cybersecurity posture. For example, attackers may analyze the frequency and types of emails they send to create more convincing phishing campaigns targeting real contacts.

Having a high bounce rate or being reported as spam by unwanted recipients lowers trustworthiness. Other than being detrimental to email marketing success, this can also become a security concern. If legitimate emails from your brand already automatically land in recipients’ spam folders, it becomes much harder to distinguish them from phishing attacks.

Not verifying marketing platforms and websites

Attackers effectively steal marketers’ login credentials by creating fake platforms and websites designed to look like originals. Some lure marketers in via phishing emails. Others use fake Google and social media ads.

Either way, gaining access to real email marketing tool accounts can have devastating consequences. It lets attackers impersonate your brand and harvest information or spread malware far more effectively. Failing to safeguard sensitive contact information also means you’re in violation of laws like the GDPR and HIPAA, with all the fees, legal consequences, and reputation damage this entails.

Prevention and Mitigation Strategies

Lessening the impact of the above mistakes or avoiding them altogether is a matter of using appropriate cybersecurity tools and behaving in a security-conscious way. Here are the most effective measures to take.

Phishing prevention

Awareness is key to phishing prevention. Email marketers need to know how to recognize the contents of such emails and keep up with the threat’s evolution, especially now that AI is used to generate the emails. It’s also important to verify the sender and the legitimacy of any provided links.

Website and tool vetting

It’s crucial that you know how to check if a website is safe before you visit it. Similarly, make sure the apps you plan to sign up for are legitimate. Download email marketing apps only from Google Play or the App Store and bookmark their official webpages if you use them from a browser. Further strengthen account security through multi-factor authentication and make sure that any related requests or links come from the official source.

Password hygiene

Passwords are only effective if each is unique and complex enough that it can’t be cracked using brute force. Password managers effectively generate as many such passwords as needed and store them inside an encrypted vault that only the marketer has access to.

Network protection

When working remotely or from abroad, the network itself can become a security concern. Monitoring unsafe networks like public Wi-Fi allows attackers to hijack active sessions, letting them log into email marketing tools without having to obtain credentials first. The best VPNs have strong encryption standards, making it impossible for attackers to intercept information or take over account control.

Maintained mailing lists

Emails need to be obtained strictly through voluntary opt-in. Even then, users need to be made aware of the purpose of the sign-up, what data you’ll be collecting and why, etc. The list needs to be maintained by making opt-out straightforward and regularly removing inactive recipients.