Email security can be tricky. Occasionally clients will come to us with questions about how best to use their email system, and how to prevent security breaches. We’ve gathered some of our best email security tips below, and we hope it helps you keep your business running smoothly.

Once you have your email system ironed out and you’re ready to start building your business with email, let us know.

1. Stop Spam & Phishing Emails In Their Tracks

The best way to stop spam and phishing emails is to educate yourself and your employees on what to look for.

Phishing and spam techniques relies on getting you to trust the sender. Usually they do this by using an email domain – the @examplecompany.com portion of the email address – which looks like a reputable company. Common examples might be: @amazon-z.com, @amazon.net, @ama-zon.com, amazononline@online.com, amazon@hotmail.com etc.

They’ll usually ask you to click on a link because they need to verify information on your account. The link usually takes you to a website which is a good copy of the company you’re expecting; similar color schemes, fonts, buttons and logos. Once you’re there, they expect you to put in your user name, password and/or account or social security number.

Your best bet is to notice these email address discrepancies and don’t click on anything in the email. Once you’ve arrived at their site, they may have already downloaded malware which can further compromise your system without you having to take a single action.

Instead, train your email filter to notice these things. Select the checkbox next to the message and choose whatever option your email provider gives you to identify the message as spam. In Gmail, this would be the “Report Spam” button. This helps your email provider realize the domain is a spam sender, and it will attempt to stop those in the future.

2. Check for Confidential Content

Email by kirstyfields

You might be the most careful person in the world, but are your employees? Make sure you have clear expectations in place about what can be transferred via email and what can’t.

Social security numbers, account information, banking information, usernames and passwords should never be sent via email. Also make sure your employees know that you and the companies or financial institutions you work with will never ask for this information via email, or via a phone number given to them via email. Always call an institution directly to a trusted number you’ve used in the past.

3. Create An Email Security Policy

Your employees might not know how best to handle a spam email, or not to send out certain confidential emails. That’s why you want to make sure you have a detailed email security policy in place. There are many sample policies out there you can go through and customize to your own needs, like this one from Tech Donut.

4. Block Certain Senders

Sometimes, your employee might try to send an email to a bunch of recipients at once with the To:, Cc: or Bcc: field. These types of emails can expose your clients to each other, which is something they may not want.

It can also accidentally expose confidential information, such as names, email addresses and other information to a wider audience, and can be constituted as spam in certain cases. Since you don’t want to cause spam yourself, you can request that your the company which controls your email server block anyone at your company from sending emails with more than 15 recipients or something similar.

As well, you can block senders coming into your system. Emails with attachments larger than 10MB can slow down your entire network, or not be delivered at all. Set a policy at your server level to block incoming and outgoing emails with attachments larger than 10MB, and to notify the sender and provide an alternate method of sending the file, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

5. Archive Emails

Make sure that you keep a backup of your emails so if a disaster should occur you can still revert to your backup. Check if your server provides a backup, and if so how often. You can also create a backup yourself using an external hard drive and a backup schedule if you feel it’s necessary.

Hopefully these tips have helped you secure your business emails. When you’re confident enough to start advertising your business through email, contact us!

Email marketing can seem like an extremely tricky business, even though email has been around for decades now. And how do you even begin to approach building a list to start emailing to? We’re sure you have a lot of questions, and hopefully this list helps you get started with your email marketing efforts. When […]

Email marketing can be difficult. One of the best ways to make sure that you’re successful at it is to be consistent. You may need help with that, and we’re always available to talk about how we can help you increase your revenue. But besides consistency, what other tips can help make your email marketing more effective?

HubSpot, one of the largest email marketing solutions out there, supplied the below statistics for this post.

1. People Are More Likely To Click Certain Words

When you’re writing the ‘call-to-action’ for your email, stick with something which includes “Click Here” rather than “Go” or “Submit”. “Click Here” has a much higher click rate than the other words, meaning more people will head to wherever you’ve linked the button to which is hopefully a landing page on your website!

2. Images Are Preferred To Text

Before you start typing your first draft, consider doing more with less. Use images to help get your message across. It turns out that 65% of people prefer more images than text in their emails, so be sure to capitalize on that with descriptive imagery and fewer words. We generally suggest 200 words or less per email.

3. Don’t Send Plain Text

In line with that, images are only visible in HTML emails. Even if they weren’t, 88% of users prefer to receive HTML emails over plain text emails, plain text meaning that there isn’t any formatting, fonts, colors or anything like that. So while some of your customers may find value in having emails be bare bones and get straight to the point, a vast majority appreciate a little flourish and style.

4. Optimize For Mobile Reading

And, we believe the most important tip here is to optimize your emails for mobile devices. 80.8% of users are reading emails on a mobile device!

Your email marketing software may be able to help you with this, but be sure to send yourself and/or your staff a test email and open it on multiple mobile devices to see how the images show up and how the text wraps, as well as if the links/buttons are able to be clicked easily.

Contact us anytime to chat about how we can help boost your ROI with email marketing!

As a small business, it can be hard to keep up with an ever-changing marketing field. Email marketing and other types can be time intensive. But if you can make the time for them, they can really boost your business.

At Cohlab, we help our clients build and sustain email campaigns across multiple industries. If you need expert help, let us know, but we hope these strategies can help set you on the right course.

8 Strategies To Boost Email Marketing For Small Businesses

1. Make It Obvious

The first key to successful email marketing is getting subscribers. You may already have users heading to your website, landing pages, blog or Facebook; use this to your advantage and give them some way of signing up, whether you find a WordPress plugin, a Facebook feature, or just give them a link to send you a generic email opting in.

The most important part is to make it obvious. Put it at the top of your pages, make it part of your Facebook cover photo, do something to get the idea of being on your mailing list in front of them and easy to do. All they should need to do is give you their name and email, don’t confuse the issue by asking for anything else.

2. Keep Them Informed

Once you’ve begun building a list, let them know what you’re using it for. Send everyone a welcome email as they are added to the list letting them know you’re grateful and that they’ll be receiving Marketing/Coupons/Blog Summaries/Survey/Etc. emails from you.

Email services like MailChimp and HubSpot (which we’ll discuss later) have an option to automatically reply to someone when they sign up for your list.

3. Subject Lines Are Important

Subject lines are key. What are you trying to get them to do, and what information is inside? Readers should be able to know without even opening the email whether anything valuable is inside for them.

Technically speaking, emails with subject lines of less than 50 characters tend to be opened more often than any other length, while subject lines of more than 70 characters tend to have links or coupons inside clicked on more often.

4. Consider Using A Service

In point #2, we mentioned MailChimp and Hubspot. These companies provide email services, allowing you to create lists, email templates, as well as keep you on the right side of the law. These email marketing providers automatically put unsubscribe links at the bottom of every email, which allows readers to opt out at any time and saves you the hassle of breaking the law.

5. Be Brief

About half of all emails are read on mobile devices, which means people are on the move. Keep your emails brief. You should really have only one or at the maximum two focuses in a single email message, to prevent confusion and keep the length in line.

200 words is usually a good maximum. If you need more than 200 words to get your point across, write a blog post instead and link from a short summary on the email to the blog post.

6. Be Committed

Keep it steady. If you feel customers will benefit from one email a month, do that and stick to it, always hitting it on the same day at about the same time. Create a calendar if you have to.

If you are doing more than one email a month, you’ll probably need a calendar. Keep it steady, with one email a week or whatever you choose.

If you decide you absolutely need to change your emailing frequency, inform your email list so they aren’t confused, or create separate lists and encourage people to subscribe to both lists if interested.

7. Stats Are Important

With an email marketing service like MailChimp or HubSpot, it’s easy to watch your statistics roll in from your email campaign. Open rates (what percentage of subscribers have opened a particular email) as well as click rates (what percentage of subscribers have clicked a link within a particular email.)

Not seeing good results? It might be time to change the time/date of your emails (see point #6.)

8. Images Might Not Show Up

Alt tags. These are text descriptions of graphics (images, photos, videos, logos.)

Every graphic you put in your email should have an alt tag, not only for those who use software to read their email to them, but also for those whose email provider has blocked images from appearing. Otherwise your customers might not even know you included a valuable coupon, or what it’s worth!

We hope these strategies have helped you on your journey, and if you need anything else, we’re just an email away!