I'm your host, James Bowers, and together we'll work with business leaders and industry experts to dive into the misunderstood business of cybersecurity and compliance to learn how to start making money from being secure and compliant. Welcome to Cash in the Cyber Sheets. Hey everybody, welcome back to Cash in the Cyber Sheets.
I'm your host, James Bowers, Chief Security and Compliance Architect here at Input Output. Very happy to have you back here with us today. Getting completely confused between Cash in the Cyber Sheets and one of our new products, ClickSafe Email, ClickSafe Academy.
I'm not going to tell you how many times I retook this, but even this time, I still kind of stumbled with it. In any case, very happy you're here. And today I want to go into, we've been talking about SPF, DKIM, DMARC, some of our new tools, some of the importance, but I really want to dive into that and really break down the idea that SPF, DKIM, all of this compliance jargon, all of these compliance tools and requirements impact ROI, that they impact creativity and that they make marketing more difficult, when in actuality, they have so much to offer on the marketing side, on the creative side.
When done right, it can really allow your creativity in the organization and the marketability to really thrive and explode. So we're going to dive into that today. Before we get into it, and we say this every time, click on that like, click on that subscribe, leave us some comments, wherever you're listening to us at, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, on our own podcast channel, on the website, would love to hear more from you and to have more people on the show, to be able to talk about the things that are working for you and also some of the things you're having trouble with.
So without further ado, and no more begging for clicks, click that like, let's go ahead and jump into it. Now, bad security, I'm just going to just very simply put, bad security ruins your marketability. And here's why.
We talked about it last episode, pretty sure it was the last episode, but how if you don't have DMARC set up correctly, if you don't have SPF, if you don't have DKIM, you don't have your email records set up correctly. What that means is that 40 to 60% of your emails could just be going to spam or completely rejected outright. From a marketing perspective, that is massive.
Imagine you're spending $10,000 a month on a marketing campaign. You're testing A, B testing, you're, you're testing all of this different copyright. Everybody's involved.
We're getting the right colors, the right formatting, everything. And as they go out the door, as your emails go to your prospects, your leads, 40 to 60% of those, 4,000 to 6,000 of those dollars a month just vanish, just into the abyss, completely lost. And your marketing teams are left trying to figure out why aren't more people clicking? Why aren't more people engaging? It must be our copy, might not be a copy at all.
It could just be a technical issue that you don't have your records, your email set up correctly. And your email's just getting flushed, just marketing dollars being wasted. Another big issue that this creates is it allows your domain to get spooked.
If your records aren't set up correctly, and this is lost trust. This is also turns into legal issues and not naming any of the companies, but I have seen this happen where a man in the middle attack of a very big wire transfer or I've seen it with title companies. I've seen it with a law, legal proceeds where the money got sent to the wrong person.
It got sent to somebody spoofing the address, spoofing the credentials in the email of the legitimate company. So the legitimate company never got their money, but the client paid it. Well, now this creates a conundrum that the client is saying, we already paid in this case.
It was a few million dollars. We already paid millions of dollars. We're not paying it again, but the company is saying we never got the money.
Long story short, it took a long legal battle. Finally, the company got their money, but I can guarantee you the trust there is gone. They will never work together again, which sucks because that's, that was a multimillion dollar deal.
More multimillion dollar deals would be great, and this could have been avoided just with proper email configuration. So from a marketing standpoint, from a dollars and cents standpoint, it's not just about checking off a box and being compliant. This is cold, hard cash.
It is why it needs to be taken so important. The next part, and this isn't just directly to dollars. This is some pretty cool competitive advantage, pretty cool marketing perspective of things.
One, we already talked about it. DMARC, SPF, DKIM, they all increase deliverability. That's really the difference between one, your email getting there at all or getting rejected, and two, getting looked at to see, should this be in spam? Should this be an inbox? Which is a huge thing.
The next step, BIMI, B-I-M-I, really helps your emails, one, visually stand out. You have your logo in the inbox. The eyes are instantly drawn to that.
You seem like a reputable company. You seem like a big player. It also drives the algorithms that decide, should we throw this into spam or should we throw this into the inbox? It's putting your message closer to the person that you're trying to reach.
That is a huge markability push. You're sending out 10,000, 100,000 emails a month, and you can increase the inbox reach. You can increase how many people are seeing it by just half a percent or a percent.
That is a major uptick. And that will relate to more sales and all the way down the line, your conversion rate, everything. Huge marketability there.
It also goes a long way in giving your compliance teams, your compliance teams and your sales teams, really your sales teams, something to brag about on calls. Very easy to see if other companies don't have their email records set up correctly. And if you do, that's just one more point that you can point out to people.
Hey, listen, here's another reason you might want to go with us. We actually know how to set our email up right. It's out there for everybody to see.
It's public knowledge. And all of these other people you're considering don't even address that. Can you just imagine what they're doing behind closed doors with things you can't see? Go ahead and sign here on the dotted line.
We're the right company for you. Another thing you can say is imagine your sales team being able to say, don't just download our ebook, but download our ebook from a domain, Google Trust. That's what DMARC does.
It's the quiet power of DMARC being able to say that these big domains trust yours. So I can't stress enough just how much marketability there is. If you really dive into this.
Another thing that having the email set up correctly is going to do is during the onboarding process, during any type of client communication. It's going to help get the emails in the inbox. We've said that we've talked about that, but what I want you to do is think about the times where you've started with a new company.
You've signed up for a new platform and you had to go searching for their emails. Where's my onboarding? Where's my verification? What do I need to click to get started? Well, I have to go search through spam or I have to go pull this out of my quarantine. And all because they didn't have it set up correctly.
That's not the best customer experience. Much better if you have everything set up right and as soon as they sign up, your emails are right where they're supposed to be. That helps build confidence and it also just helps prevent things from getting derailed.
In some cases, you may say that the client's never going to notice and that might be true. But they will notice when it's not there. So those are the big things, the marketability, the direct, honestly, direct cash in pocket or preventing cash from being lost.
Some ways that you can help manage this. One, you can use some of Google's tools, silly wabbit, to check if your email is set up correctly. You can also go right to inputoutput.com slash email dash audit and you can plug in your domain and see any of your issues there with SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and BIMI.
And even reach right out to us to where we can help walk you through how to fix everything and even make it easy to manage and turn that into profitability and better marketability. With that said, please, please, please check your email records. Over 80% of the companies that we look at, over 80% of the people that we're talking to on LinkedIn and reaching out to do not have this set up correctly.
And with the changes that we talked about from last podcast, May 2025, this year, just a few weeks ago, May 5th, with all the changes from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. With them now requiring DMARC, this is only going to get worse and it's going to be more emails getting rejected if this isn't set up correctly. So do yourself a favor, do your marketing a favor, and make sure to get this taken care of.
Happy to help. Thank you for listening. And until next time.
Thanks for joining us today. Don't forget, click that subscribe button, leave us a review and share it with your network. Remember, security and compliance aren't just about avoiding risk.
They're about unlocking your business's full potential. So stay secure, stay compliant, and we'll catch you next week on Cash in the Cyber Sheets. Goodbye for now.
