CMOs: Phishing puts your brand at risk
Email is the top communication channel for marketers to reach their customers and drive revenue. Unfortunately, email is also the preferred channel of cybercriminals, used to carry out phishing attacks. This negatively impacts the stuff marketers care about, like reaching their customers and brand trust. Not to mention dropping engagement rates as consumers are increasingly afraid to open emails.
Phishing has long been a concern of information security and technology teams, but marketers need to be involved in promoting email security measures at their organizations in order to preserve brand reputation and trust in the email channel.
Email is the top revenue-generating marketing channel, yielding a 38:1 return on investment (1). At the same time, the danger of phishing is growing. Modern phishing tactics such as domain impersonation are becoming more common, and attacks are more sophisticated and difficult to detect as fraudulent. Intel reports that 97% of people are unable to identify a phishing message.
This cybersecurity threat is turning the email channel into a trust and brand reputation landmine.
The need for marketers’ involvement in email security conversations boils down to these key issues:
- Brand damage. After being phished, customers are 42% less likely to engage with your brand. (2)
- Decrease in revenue. After a breach, 60% of your customers will likely consider leaving and 30% actually will. (3)
- Lower deliverability. If you get phished, ESPs are more likely to put your messages in the spam folder.
The most important step marketers can take against the threat of fraud is becoming champions for email authentication. Using email authentication, you can preserve your sender reputation and ensure your messages have the best possible chance at hitting consumers’ inboxes.
In addition, enforcing DMARC is the only way to ensure that emails from criminals impersonating your corporate domain are not delivered to your clients — damaging your brand and your consumer’s trust.
For more information about email authentication, read our blog post.
(1) VentureBeat
(2) Cloudmark
(3) Return Path
