Will Your Email Program Share the Same Fate as TikTok?

The US’s decision to ban TikTok (although it was given a temporary 75-day reprieve) took businesses, content creators, and users by surprise. Despite the warnings, many believed it wouldn’t happen. The impact led some content creators and consumers to other platforms, some remained at a loss. With all this said, downtime, be it a day or a lifetime, creates a significant burden for both businesses and consumers. 

Richelo Killian wrote an article titled “Would your business survive if your audience platform shuts down?” It’s a great question. What would happen to your business? Although he was referencing the TikTok ban, it could be any medium. Richelo suggests that if you have email in place, you could weather the storm.

Multichannel marketing is known to be a successful strategy for stronger ROI and brand awareness. Lauren Del Vecchio, Email Deliverability Manager from Yotpo, shared a case study about their client Mool, celebrating the success of growing their email list and ROI with the right combination and synergy of multichannel efforts. But what happens if one of those channels is shut down by local regulation, a technical issue, or by, gasp, human error?

Besides the ROI benefit, channel closure is another great reason to have multiple channels doing the work. Not to let a single platform be your only basket to hold your eggs, spreading your marketing across multiple sources to have redundancy for your program. To invest in sources you own and control and can protect.

So, what if you make email the foundation of your marketing strategy as Richolo suggests, would that protect you? Again, it seems like a lot of omelets cooking on one pan to me. Should that pan get knocked off the stove, nobody gets to eat.

Email isn’t impenetrable. What if email were to be shut down, even if only temporarily? Do you feel your business could weather the storm?

If email is the foundation of your online marketing, is there anything you can do to protect or prepare should that day come? Below I’ve listed out 8 areas of your program that could be vulnerable and questions you can ask yourself to begin building out plans and policies to protect it. And when you’re done with this list, keep researching as this is only a starting point.

8 Vulnerabilities for Email Marketing Programs

System Outages

Unfortunately, systems fail. It’s a part of technology and life. If you grew up with Windows, you’re painfully aware of the “blue screen of death”. Not every system is under your control, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some control.

• Do you have a failsafe should your website or hosting providers go down? Is your email strong enough as a standalone if links and possibly images aren’t working? Do you have backup servers and services?
• What plan do you have should DNS go down? DNS is fundamental to your email and your website. Do you keep your zone files backed up should you need to move to another server or provider?
• Do you have a secondary plan should your ESP have an outage? If not for your marketing emails, do you have redundancy in place for crucial emails? Or does your ESP have redundancy built into their service?
• Are your website and other marketing channels ready to step up should email go down? Remember email isn’t just about what is going out of your system, but failures could also happen at the receiving end.
• Is customer service ready? Do you even have customer service? Are you prepared with people or AI? Is that enough?

Technical Breaks

Sometimes something doesn’t get coded correctly and it breaks the functionality of the program sending the email or the email code is flawed to a point where the receivers refuse to accept it. A single DNS change or misunderstanding about a DNS entry can create collisions and break how an email works or the ability to send it.

• Are you QA’ing EVERYTHING? From the sequel designing and populating your email to changes in the flows or data to DNS entries. QA is the time to catch issues that can halt critical communications.
• Are you asking questions? Before you even make a change, ask WHY a change is being made. Ask what the new entries need and if they will collide with what is in place today. Is the new layout and format the same? If it’s different, will the system work the same? Are there mappings in place now that will break?

Data Houses

Despite what they promise you, if you are purchasing or renting lists, you're bound to build a program resistant to delivery. Lists that aren’t yours are vulnerable to spam traps, complaints, and resounding signals to mailbox providers that your data is not consented and is of poor quality. Shutting down an email program isn’t just stopping it technically but keeping it from working. Being listed on a big blocklist or an internal blocklist at mailbox providers is enough to stop your program in its tracks.

• Do you know where your data is coming from?
• Is consent clear and conspicuous?
• Do you own the consent?

Competitors

If you aren’t a unicorn in the space, you’re likely vying for the attention of potential customers against your competitors. Once you get that attention, you need to take care of it so that your competitors don’t swoop in and make your program irrelevant and unimpactful.

• Are you staying relevant with your customers?
• Are you still valuable?
• Are you building brand loyalty to help weather the waves of new competitor offerings?
• Are you paying attention to what your competitor is doing?

Account and Domain Compromise

Losing control of your system not only can stop your mail, but it can introduce extreme risk as your system can be used to spam those on your list OR the bad actor could introduce bad data into your system so they can spam. This not only harms those receiving the mail but harms the ESPs system and your brand’s reputation.

• Are your systems (email, data, DNS, website) protected with secure passwords and MFA? Are you using password keepers so that all passwords are unique?
• Are you auditing your DNS for dangling CNAMEs that can allow bad actors to send with your domain?
• Are you protecting your mail stream with DMARC so bad actors don’t mail on your domain and impact your brand and domain reputation?
• Are you and your teams trained in phishing and business compromise emails and taking the proper precautions around their own email?

Data Compromise

Data is the backbone of online activity. Care for it like you would your own personal belongings. It’s your business's treasure chest. If it’s compromised, you’re looking at more than a PR nightmare, but a break in trust with your customer base, potentially putting them at risk as well. And compromised data can range from data theft to compromising the quality impacting what receivers see coming from your system.

• Are you collecting consent?
• Are you honoring data requests and opt-out requests?
• Are you protecting your data flows, inbound and outbound?
• Are you using CAPTCHA and weeding out bots?
• Are you analyzing who is onboarding and their value?
• Is your data properly protected, encrypted?
• Are you storing data beyond its usefulness?
• Are you limiting who has access to your data?
• Are you updating passwords and auditing access?

Mailbox Providers

Yep, mailbox providers can be the bane of your existence and destroy your ability to mail. But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it happen, at least not for senders following best practices. For senders I’ve worked with that struggle, it’s not that they are intentionally mailing against best practices, but they didn’t get set up correctly or know what the right thing was to do. If you plan to make email your main channel, treat it well and access resources that educate on best practices.

Your own actions

Digital faceplants are enough to stop your email program in its tracks.

• Did you send something out with language or imagery that was off branding or off-putting? Are you prepared to address via a follow-up email and via other communication channels?
• Did you typo your targeting selections from the last 360 days to the last 3600 days of engagement? What are your QA steps to prevent human-introduced accidents?
• Was the shortest path the chosen path? In setup, warming, or any steps related to email, often the shortest path has the most risk. Warming isn’t something to be rushed. Quick setup doesn’t always mean it’s the right one or that it’s complete. Evaluate steps against time and focus on getting things done the right way the first time.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash