Email marketing provides various advantages, but to benefit from them, you should prioritize email security. It will guarantee the efficiency of all your marketing campaigns. 

But first, how to define email security? It includes implementing different techniques to protect email accounts and communications from various email security threats like phishing attempts, spamming, and spoofing. So, as an organization, your job is to guarantee that you take certain actions to guarantee your company’s email is secure. Let’s discuss why it is crucial and discuss the main benefits. 

Four benefits of email security 

Most companies use email to communicate both with their teams and outside of the company, like clients and customers. Email remains one most vital and effective communication tools as billions of people and organizations communicate via email and send different types of emails on a daily basis. Statistics have shown that  306 billion emails are sent and received each day. For that reason, email is the biggest target for email attacks. So it’s a must for them to start securing their email, and here we will give them reasons why they should start it as soon as possible.

Creates an image of a credible and available company

First and foremost, following email security best practices can guarantee continuous and consistent communication with your employees and customers. This way, the growth of a company wouldn’t stop any minute. Your teams can work on different important tasks knowing the company’s important communication tool is secure.

Customers, when communicating via email or purchasing your creating products, want to know that it is a company that takes care of both customers and the company’s security. And representing yourself as a company that takes cybersecurity seriously automatically increases the credibility of your company and creates an image of a company that customers can trust. This statement is true not only for companies working directly with customers but when it is B2B companies that want to collaborate with you. These companies want to be sure that your organization took steps to avoid email attacks.

It saves your time and resources  

There is no great discovery there that time is one of the essential factors for companies to reach their goals. Aside from the different great advantages, prioritizing the security of your email will save you a lot of time. Imagine if attackers target your businesses, but you also need speed and a lot of time to solve the problems you will encounter. This will damage the visibility of your company as well. Besides taking your valuable time to solve the damage, you need to invest resources as well. Your organization should spend valuable time and resources to solve all the effects that attacks can bring. Therefore all the efforts and investments you make to secure your email will pay for themselves. Lastly, ensuring the security of your transactional emails becomes even more crucial as it not only saves time and resources but also safeguards your company’s reputation and operational efficiency.

Makes spam and phishing protection stronger

One of the best advantages of implementing a security system for your email and using email security software is the opportunity to protect against phishing attacks. The number speaks for them targets open  70% of phishing emails, which causes much damage.

Attractors send phishing emails from a source that seems trustworthy, and they are malicious emails that attackers want to steal confidential data like financial information, bank account numbers, account passwords, or credit card information. Attackers send phishing emails because it doesn’t cost any money and can easily give them access to the company’s sensitive information.

Spam emails are unsolicited and can be damaging if you open or respond, and they can include malicious links that can infect your devices with malware. There are different types of dangerous spam emails and when cybercriminals send them, they add a sense of urgency to make you act quickly.  

For this reason, you should make email security part of your company’s policy and use software that will discover suspicious emails when sending different types of emails, whether for internal communication or external interactions. Not only that, you should follow email security best practices to secure confidential and valuable data.

Prevents identity theft

When communicating via email for business purposes, people share extremely sensitive data, starting from credit card numbers to personal information as well. This makes them the target of identity theft. If attackers manage to access your email password, they will send messages pretending to be email account owners. But following email security best practices, you can make the email that includes sensitive information unreadable to all parties. But first of all, avoid sending emails about your financial and personal data if possible. And when you get a suspicious email, always pay attention to the credit card and bank account statements.

4 Best email security practices

We already discussed reasons why you should start investing in securing your email, now it’s time to go through best practices for securing the email. Only by knowing and following the right steps can you guarantee the security of your email.

Train your employees

Every business owner knows the big role employees play in a company’s growth. Therefore successful companies realize the importance of employee training and invest in employee development. In cybersecurity as well, employees should learn all the necessary information to be aware of all threats and the ways how to keep safe your email accounts against email-borne cyberattacks. For that, there are employee programs designed especially for the whole organization and also for employees whose email is at a higher risk. Also, regular security awareness campaigns can help educate employees about email security solutions and empower them to confidently identify and respond to potential threats.

When employees know to identify best security practices and potential signs of an attack, they don’t click a link that has a virus or won’t open malicious links also and don’t trust emails that don’t have a clear subject line emails from an unknown or unrecognized sender.

What is must, from the employee onboarding process, is they should be well aware not to send sensitive and important information like financial information or their passwords. Even if your employees use their personal devices for work, ensure that it is equipped with the perfect tools and software to guarantee their safety. It is essential to avoid using public WI-Fi as well.

Create strong passwords and regularly change them

Speaking about employee training, you should know it includes teaching your staff password protection and password management tips. What is the password purpose anyway of securing your account from attacks? Your employees should use a unique password for every account and regularly change their passwords to avoid email security threats.

Here are tactics you should use to create strong passwords:

• Use both upper and lower case letters and include numbers, special characters
• Use phrases instead of words
• Try to be as unique as possible
• Contain uncommon words or a random string of letters
• Avoid including obvious information like birth dates

After these steps, to implement best security practices,  you should consider changing your passwords regularly because it can be damaging when you reuse passwords both for business and personal accounts; strong and unique passwords are important to every account because they will make it harder for scammers to exploit.

Use two-factor and multi-factor authentication

After training your employees and creating a strong password, your job is to think about multi-factor authentication, which is an excellent option to secure your emails. Strong passwords are vital, but you need to take additional steps to guarantee security. For that, companies have to use two-factor or multi-factor authentication. This is a process when logging in to your email, and you input your password as proof to access an account. Other parties can’t access your account without that second piece of information, like these codes that are by SMS, email, and voice calls; the email account gets a notification to complete another step in the verification process. This process protects your emails and guarantees that hackers can’t steal your password. And even if they manage to steal it they can’t sign into your email account if you implement two-factor authentication. 

Implement email encryption

Among the different ways to secure your email, one of the most beneficial is email encryption which is the authentication process that protects your email’s secret and sensitive information. It guarantees that only recipients have access to that. If the hackers can’t read your message because it’s encrypted, they can’t do anything with the information. Therefore you need to implement an email encryption solution when sending sensitive information over email because it disguises the email content and ensures that only authorized recipients can access the information. Email encryption is necessary when sharing sensitive information, but it will be beneficial not only to encrypt all of your emails. It makes a sent message and turns it into an unreadable format. 

Many companies that use email encryption have advantages that it gives like:

•  Data Privacy and Security
•  Authentication
•  Regulatory Compliance

Start Encrypting email messages before they’re sent and, choose how important information you send, choose the perfect way of encryption.

Wrapping up

Step by step, we came to the conclusion that email security is an absolute must for all types and sizes of companies, regardless of their type and size. We discuss the advantages of following these steps. First and foremost, it saves your time and resources and builds an image of a trustworthy company. And this method will guarantee that you prevent spamming and phishing.

We also discussed best practices for securing your email, which includes creating a strong email, training your employees, and also using two two-factor authentications. In this stage, email encryption is crucial as well. Don’t hesitate to follow the best practices to effectively guarantee that your email is perfectly secure.