For decades, marketers have focused on satisfying consumers’ interests, experiences and expectations. For instance, supermarkets have used customer data to learn how to organise products in store to provide the best shopping experience. Today is no different, except that marketers are becoming increasingly focused on using digital channels to create a personalised consumer experience that drives customer acquisition and retention.
At the crux of this ability to complete a myriad of interactions over the internet – whether its shopping online, managing your bank account or using social media – is email. It remains the most ubiquitous form of communication that marketers use to engage with customers. While CMOs are investing heavily in other digital marketing platforms, they still depend on email as one of the primary tools for engaging with customers and continuing to build and sustain that relationship. As a result, it’s no surprise that the Radicati group’s Email Statistics Report of 2013-2017 shows that the number of consumers using email will grow to over 2.8 billion within the next three years.
The catch-22
While it’s imperative to use the online power channels to engage with digital-savvy customers, the internet has remained a digital wild west. With no one government or regulator able to police activity across the internet, a new generation of criminals has emerged.
Today, consumers know that brands collect privileged and confidential information to personalise interactions. While consumers presume this information is protected, as we’ve all seen from a quick scan of the headlines, this is not the case. Data is not safe. Cybercriminals know that the internet is a hotbed for consumer data, and they use increasingly sophisticated and clever methods to go after personal information, impersonating brands to pry it loose.
The tipping point
Typically, all nascent markets reach a tipping point, in which they experience a wake-up call; a confirmation of crisis, then a moment when people say enough is enough. With cybersecurity, that moment has arrived and it is hurting brands across the globe.
Cybersecurity breaches happen every day and consumers are rarely informed until long after the breach actually occurred. But change is being demanded. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in damaging and costly cyberattacks in the last three years. While businesses still struggle with sophisticated attacks, consumers are increasingly voting with their loyalty and taking business elsewhere after a cyberattack. Brand reputation is at stake — the cybersecurity tipping point is here as consumers rightly expect and demand trust to be restored.
In the end, consumer protection is all about customer experience, and this will be the biggest competitive differentiator for CMOs in 2015. CMOs, in close partnership with CISOs, must take the mantle of driving safe and secure customer experience in the digital age.
Below are three steps CMOs must take to ensure their cybersecurity practices are up to snuff and their customers are protected:
Put customer protection at the core of your digital strategy
Consumers today are increasingly anxious about identity theft and fraudulent email. Most consumers have at least one example of a phishing attack or an anecdote of someone who’s had their personal information compromised. As a result, if you don’t have customer protection at the core of your digital strategy, consumers will get scammed, hurt, then they will disengage from your brand and warn others. All the digital marketing investments in the world won’t help you keep your customers if they don’t trust companies to keep their data safeguarded. If trust is lost, so is the brand. If the brand is lost, so is the ability to drive demand.
Work closely with the CISO to ensure your marketing and security strategies are aligned
CMOs look at all the touch points related to customer acquisition and retention, and those touch points are crucial for building brand loyalty, decreasing the cost of acquiring customers, and streamlining the upsell process. But, from the CISO’s perspective, at each of these touch points there is an inherent risk. CMOs and CIOs must work together to eliminate those threats at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Yet the only source common to all of the touch points is email, which is the biggest risk today and the most unsecure link in the customer interaction chain. CMOs must have a risk-based conversation with CISOs around how best to execute digital marketing strategies safely and securely.
Stay attuned to security breaches in your industry and communicate early and often in the event of a breach
Ideally, you want your CISO to be the first to tell the world of a breach when it occurs, and your CMO to be the first to tell your customers how you can help them. Not that long ago, phishing attempts were quite primitive, so it was easier for consumers to know something was amiss. On top of that, consumers weren’t as glued to their inboxes as they are today, nor did they expect or receive highly personalised emails detailing their transaction history with a company.
What has changed is the data breach; criminals are breaking into companies, stealing consumer data and much more. They can replicate a company’s current sales campaign, hijacking and impersonating the brand to steal from its customers. It is no longer sufficient for a company to simply to put up a webpage telling consumers how to be careful. Because breaches now are often direct attacks on a company’s customers, it’s incumbent on CMOs and CISOs upon learning of a breach to communicate loudly, frequently, and tell customers what their company is doing to protect them. Since they’re wearing a mantle of customer protection, CMOs who do this can increase brand value before and after an attack.
The keystone of these three steps outlined above is trust. To establish trust with customers requires that brands protect and safeguard customer’s personal data. In our digital age, and with the reality that cyberattacks aren’t soon vanishing, it is critical to place customer protection at the core of your digital strategy. CMOs and brands that aggressively and genuinely assume the mantle of customer protection can prosper in an age of cyberattacks, while those that don’t stand to lose a great deal.
By Patrick Peterson, chief executive officer at Agari.
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