Email marketing is particularly attractive to marketers in the early days of the Internet. It costs next to nothing to use them. Marketers need not deploy any new application but leverage off existing assets the company already owns – the email system.

The idea of using emails as a marketing channel caught on and soon many marketers were blasting away to promote their company’s offerings. This behavior resulted in SPAM. It became irritating as messages were irrelevant. Also with repeated messages, it fast become annoying and was overwhelming inboxes. Eventually, this uncontrol, excessive behavior led to the birth of SPAM laws to control these spammers and their unwanted messages.

While spam laws have been around for a long time. It never resulted in many emails landing in junk or spam folders. Something else is at foot.

The rise of phishing

Now there is a newer threat in our inboxes – phishing emails. Phishing emails are more insidious and more malicious than spam emails. While spam emails were merely irritating, they didn’t cause much trouble beyond that. However, with phishing emails, it is a whole new ballgame.

Source : FBI Internet Cybercrime Report 2021

Phishing emails can cause companies and their associates (i.e. customers, stakeholders, etc.) some damaging problems. Problems like locking digital assets, stealing confidential data, taking over IT assets to launch further attacks on other organizations, etc. These are problems companies can live without.

To counter this issue, companies have set up mechanisms to deal with this new threat.

The rise of privacy regulations

One of the major drivers for companies to start taking action to protect the organization’s inboxes is regulations, specifically those relating to personal data. With regulations like GDPR, companies are liable to pay huge fines if there is a data breach of personal data.

As cybercriminals can easily enter an organization’s network via emails, incoming emails have to be protected against these perpetrators.

To meet regulatory expectations, companies have put in policies, processes and measures to protect themselves against these new regulations.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the past, organizations relied on users’ inputs on whether an email was a spam email. It was a manual process, without much automation and checks.

These days not only do we have automation but built-in intelligence in spam filtering applications to detect spammy emails. With AI, the check goes deeper into the content. Hence, increasingly you might find your email not landing in the inbox if your content is not properly crafted. For example, if you are sending promotional emails to any Gmail accounts, they will not land in your inbox, but in other folders (please refer below).

The rise of service providers’ blacklists

Blacklists have existed with us for a long time now. They existed mostly in the domain of cybersecurity specialists to list out rouge IPs and domains. However, increasingly, the use of blacklists is expanding beyond the traditional use of keeping perpetrators out of the network.

Service providers, namely Internet service providers, email hosting providers, email marketing service providers, application service providers have a blacklist. The purpose of these blacklists is to weed out rouge users of their services. Why? Simple, they themselves need to be compliant to regulatory laws

To provide an affordable service, service providers use a shared-services model where its customers use an application mounted on a server. All it takes is one inconsiderate user to ruin the reputation of the IP of the server. All users on the server with the same IP will be affected. Hence, service providers are keen to identify these abusers and will not hesitate to have them removed if they fail to heed any warnings.

Let’s have a conversation if you would like to avoid your emails heading to the spam/junk folder or blacklist.

Once the malicious email (with your domain) lands in your recipient’s inbox, and if they are opened, all sorts of malware may be unleashed on their computer and network. This will cause a lot of problems for them as well as for you.

So what can you do about it?

Enter Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (aka DMARC). DMARC is an email authentication mechanism. It consists of two parts – a verification component and a policy component.

However, DMARC does not work alone. It requires two set of information from the authorised email server – the Sender Policy Framework (aka SPF) and Domain Key Identified Mail (aka DKIM). These three records residing at the Domain Name Server (aka DNS) will help email-receiving servers to determine the authenticity of the mail and how to handle the email thereafter (i.e. allowed the email to pass through, put into a spam or junk folder, or simply rejected it).

The technical implementation of DMARC, SPF and DKIM has several business benefits which brand and business owners should take note of.

#1 Prevents Email Spoofing

It is easy to send off emails with fake domains. This is due to the lack of an authentication mechanism in current mail servers. Cybercriminals are aware of this loophole and are taking advantage of it.

Cyber criminals also knows that a familiar email is more likely to be opened than one from a stranger. Customers and business associates who have come to trust you and your brand are more likely to trust the email and its the content, thinking the email is legitimate.

DMARC, together with SPF and DKIM, blocks out cyber criminals’ email spoofing attempts through a system of verification and authentication. They ensure that only authenticated emails land in the inboxes.

#2 Business Protection

If a fraudulent email is successful in its mission, and causes damage to another organisation, the victim company may seek legal redress from your company for “allowing” the incident to happen. Your company’s progress and productivity may be impacted as you get embroiled in a civil suit. If the matter is picked up by the press and make known. This could put a dent in your business as customers and associates might stay away for fear of being the next victim. Their may be financial and reputation impact, eventually affecting revenue.

#3 Avoiding the Spam/ Junk Folder

Before deploying DMARC for your domain, receiving email servers have no way of authentication your emails. Hence, your emails may find a home in your recipient’s spam or junk folder.

With DMARC deployed, the chances of emails landing in the inbox are higher. This is crucial for transactional or important emails, where you do not wish them landing in a spam/junk folder. This may cause some inconveniences and even confusion for the receiving party, resulting in a poor experience with your brand.

#4 Improved Marketing RoI

If you are running a marketing campaign, you want your emails to reach as many inboxes of your target audience as possible. It doesn’t help your marketing effort with your marketing emails landing in your recipient’s spam box. This severely impacts on your marketing metrics, projecting a lower return on investment (aka RoI).

With DMARC together with email marketing best practices, emails performance can be properly tracked, reflecting the true RoI of your marketing campaigns.

#5 Avoid being Blacklisted

With SPAM laws in place, Internet Service Providers (aka ISPs) and Email Service providers (aka ESPs) are setting up blacklists to list down domains and IP addresses that are misbehaving (i.e. spamming).

Mass mailing also consumes precious bandwidth. This cost ISPs as they have to purchase more bandwidth to accommodate more traffic. On the part of ESPs, they themselves do not wish to be penalized by ISPs and placed on a blacklist. Hence, they have their own blacklist to weed out non-compliant customers.

Once on any blacklist, it may take weeks if not months to be removed from it. Also if you are not diligent enough to quickly remove yourself on a blacklist, you may quickly be listed on other blacklists. This will adversely affect your sender score and domain reputation.

#7 Better Sender Score

In the world of finance, there is a scoring system called the credit score. The purpose of the credit score is to determine the credit worthiness of a borrower.

Similarly, in the world of emails, there is a similar system called the sender score. Through this system, ESPs are able to determine whether your domain has a good or poor email track record. A number between 0 and 100 is assigned to domains. The higher the score a domain has, the better would be the preferential treatment by major mailbox providers. You want to have a sender score of more than 70.

Internet and email service providers rely on various metrics to determine a domain’s reputation – sender score is one of them. It has a high weightage. You do not want your domain to have a poor sender score.

#7 Identify Email Senders

These days many applications are being used across the organisation. You have sales using a CRM, marketing using email marketing systems and various analytics solutions, customer support using ticketing support systems to help customers with their issues etc. For the purpose of better tracking and reporting, some of these applications are able to send off emails through their application.

During a DMARC deployment, before a DMARC policy is enforced, DMARC can surface all IPs that are sending off emails with your domain. From there, you can white list certain IPs and blacklist any unauthorized IPs at work. Without DMARC, you are allowing nefarious elements to continue their malicious work.

From the above, the benefits of deploying a DMARC policy are overwhelming. If you need help with your DMARC deployment, do not hesitate to reach out to us.

However, times have changed. Today,  there are several laws in place that require activities that involve the gathering, use, storage, and disposal of personal data to comply with privacy regulations. These laws are not to be taken likely, and it affects everyone.

Even before privacy law kicks in, a domain may be blocked and blacklisted by Internet service providers if the domain has a history of spamming. What this means is that your email might even not even reach your audiences if these service providers have their way. No one likes spammers.

Besides regulatory requirements and being on a blacklist, mass emailing via traditional email clients is an inherently unproductive activity when it comes to marketing.

For starters, a marketer has no insights into the effectiveness of the activity. They do not have a view of whether the client has opened or even viewed their emails. There is no insight into whether this channel of marketing is an effective one. Without this simple insight, a marketer is just shooting in the dark. This lack of information leads to a lot of marketing challenges.

Without the ability to understand their audience behavior, a marketer is unable to do any segmentation. Without proper segmentation, customers might receive emails that are not relevant to them. This makes for a poor customer experience when they receive emails with marketing messages that do not resonate with them. You might even be reported as a spammer and get your emails channeled into a spam folder.

One of the critical technical limitations of traditional email services is that it does not allow emails to be scheduled.

Studies have shown that at certain times of the day, more time is spent reading emails than at other times. If there is a need to send emails over the weekend or after office hours, you might need to hire someone willing to do the job or deploy a system to resolve this issue.

The scheduling feature in email marketing tools comes in handy too for many other occasions like reminders if you are providing regular services, birthday greetings, anniversary notes, etc. Automating such repetitive tasks saves a lot of time. From the client’s perspective, they would be happy to receive such celebratory greetings. If not, at least you would look upon favorably over your competitors who are not doing so. Hence, an investment in an email marketing system pays dividends even after a sale is made.

Behavioral studies have shown that a buyer would likely make a purchase only after repeated exposure. Automating a series of emails with different messages sent off on different days would be most helpful in this nurturing effort. This increases the likelihood of a sale for your brand.

Knowing that it costs up to five times or more to sell to a prospect than to an existing customer, businesses are constantly seeking ways to cross-sell or upsell to their customers. Being able to tag a subscriber in the email marketing system would allow businesses to have a better idea of how to increase spending with your brand. Businesses can now put in front of their customer complementary solutions that they might need.

By crafting the automation once, the same automation could be re-used for all customers buying the same product. This saves a lot of time.

Thus an email marketing is not only necessary in today’s privacy-conscious world but brings a host of benefits pre and post-sales.

There are many email marketing applications in the market, and they are all not created the same. They have their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Through understanding you and your business, we would be able to advise an appropriate system that works for you.

Speak to us today for a non-obligation discussion!