It’s hard to get into your customers inbox already but it’s getting tougher.  With landlines disappearing, scammers are moving to email and mobile scams.  This increase in phishing activity will hurt email deliverability, so be prepared.  According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the first quarter of 2016 saw more phishing attacks than ever.

There was a 250 percent increase in phishing sites between October 2015 and March 2016. “We always see a surge in phishing during the holiday season, but the number of phishing sites kept going up from December into the spring of 2016,” said Greg Aaron, APWG Senior Research Fellow and Vice-President of iThreat Cyber Group. “The sustained increase into 2016 shows phishers launching more sites, and is cause for concern.”

The full report can be found here.  As a marketer, this should have you worried.  Stricter deliverability from email clients creates the need to secure the email channel.  Phishers can spoof your company’s domain in a malicious email.  This does more than compromise your customers’ data. You also lose customer trust, hurt your email efforts and ruin your ROI.  As a result, companies will try to solve these problems.

There’s Hope for Email Deliverability

ReturnPath has some ideas on what it will look like:

  • Domain Accreditation
    • Trillions more IP addresses are available using IPv6, which means more spoofing.  Senders will likely need their domain accredited.
  • Personalization
    • Mail clients will require personal information in order to make it past the filter.
  • Data sharing across touch points
    • Companies may begin sharing customer data in order to create a better experience.
  • Cyber Security
    • Marketers and Tech people will collaborate to create a more secure email channel similar to HTTPS for web.
  • Predictive Intelligence
    • Optimize your campaign send times to increase open rate.

In conclusion, your creative email campaigns may end up in the spam folder soon.  But not to worry, there are companies like ReturnPath and MailMonitor to help with email deliverability.  We’ve seen some clients improve their email programs dramatically using these vendors.  Keep an eye for the future and you’ll be in good shape.

See our guide to Email Marketing
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