Phishing attacks are on the rise, and they’re more deceptive than ever. An estimated 97% of people globally can’t correctly identify a sophisticated phishing email. Chances are your customers are among these people and it’s costing you more than you think. The good news is you can take steps to combat phishing and fraud, protect your brand reputation, and maintain your email programs integrity and performance.
What is phishing?
Phishing means a malicious party is posing as your company and trying to convince your customers to make a fraudulent purchase or hand over personal information. The consequences range from customers being scammed for a small amount of money to complete identity theft. When phishing emails exist in your email channel, they expose the security of your IP, domain, and other private information, but most of all they create a negative correlation to your email channel and brand. Essentially, when you mail to fraudulent email addresses, you are then associated with them.
Even though you’re not the perpetrator, these phishing emails can cost you big — in loss of brand reputation, poor email performance, and lost revenues. And it’s only going to get worse. According to a recent study from Aite Group, phishing attacks rose more than 162% between 2010 and 2014. The same study estimates that by 2018, online fraud will cost U.S. organizations $6.4 billion.
The value of customer trust
Your revenues are directly linked to customer trust. A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25 to 95% increase in company profits. However, when customers don’t trust you, they stop engaging with you — by as much as 42%. That means phishing will cost you in terms of current campaign ROI as well as future sales.
The cost of poor email performance
Phishing scams cost you opens and clicks because customers might not believe your legitimate emails are actually from you. What’s more, Google and other email service providers recently started flagging suspected phishing emails with a red question mark or other warning signs — or rejecting them outright. When people don’t read or engage with your emails, your revenues suffer. Read more on the high cost of poor email performance in our white paper found here.
What’s a marketer to do?
While phishing isn’t going away anytime soon, there are steps you can take to protect your brand and your customers.
Clean and verify your list.
The first step toward fighting email phishing is to authenticate your legitimate emails using data hygiene and verification. Hygiene serves a dual purpose: it will help block phishing attacks before they reach your customers and it will maintain the integrity and performance of your legitimate campaigns. Webbula can help you remove these threats and validate your good emails with our hygiene and verification services.
Use only clean advertising data.
The next step is to use clean advertising data from a trusted data provider to combat ad fraud and avoid malicious bots. Choose a provider, like Webbula, who prioritizes data quality over quantity. Webbula is a data hygiene company at our core, and we apply this technology across all our solutions for email marketing and online ad targeting. While many data providers to not cleanse their data because it hurts their numbers, Webbula prioritizes the highest quality by applying hygiene and verification to every record.
Apply anti-phishing technology.
New anti-phishing technology can identify bad domains and fraudulent email addresses that threaten to destroy your brand reputation and marketing revenues. Webbula recently expanded our CloudHygiene product line to include phishing detection solutions.
Contact us to learn more about how Webbula can protect your brand from the costly damage of phishing and fraud.
