If you use an electronic device, you already know the sinking feeling of spam. Experts estimate that the majority of landline phone calls are now spam, and nearly half of all emails are spam, totaling over 160 billion spam messages each day. Thanks to spam filters and more aggressive spam monitoring, the amount of spam has declined slightly from its peak in 2022, but even so, the sheer volume of spam is a drag on business efficiency and is costing your company money every day.
- Spam wastes time and productivity. Employees who receive around 100 emails per day spend up to 80 hours per years deleting spam and searching through spam folders to ensure nothing vital went to spam. Even employees who receive as few as 30 emails per day spend 5 hours per year just deleting spam.
- Lost leadership focus. As you might imagine, when managers and executives spend time dealing with email spam, that’s time they are not spending on running the business. Higher-ups, who receive the most email, are spending 80 hours—two full work weeks—each year sorting and deleting spam, which is two weeks they are not strategizing ways to enhance the business and improve its performance.
- Spam’s threat to your business. Not all spam is advertising. A significant portion of spam, especially spam targeting businesses, involves phishing scams, malware, and other forms of digital attacks and attempted data breaches. All it takes is a single employee not paying attention or making an errant click for you to be on the hook for massive liability when customer data is compromised.
- Spam’s cost to your reputation. On the other extreme, spammers might choose to masquerade as your organization and send emails or text messages pretending to be from you. This can cause significant reputational damage if your organization becomes associated with spam or confused for spam and scams.
With so much risk inherent in spam, your business simply cannot afford to drown in robocalls, fake texts, spam emails, and social media bots. In order to ensure your business maximizes its productivity and protects its valuable data, there are some strategies you can use to better protect yourself.
- Education. First and foremost, you need to make sure that every member of your team understands the risks of spam and has the training to understand how to identify it and what to do about it. Training is key, and employees should be regularly reminded about key ways to identify different types of spam. Emphasizing the importance of not clicking any links or opening any attachments in messages from unknown senders is vital. Even if it seems like everyone should know about this, many people click anyway. But when it comes to training, it’s also a good idea to make it engaging. A boring PowerPoint presentation may deliver information cheaply and quickly, but if employees are simply clicking through without reading it, did it really accomplish its goal?
- Spam filtering. Spam filtering is so common that many of us rarely give it a thought, but there are many different types of filter and different levels of filtering. Regularly update and evaluate your spam filtering strategy to ensure that you are neither too aggressive nor too lax—after all, you don’t want to lost important customer messages to your filter. It’s also important to consider plugins that will automatically trap spam sent through your website’s contact forms to help shut down another potential line of attack that you may not have considered.
- Take action against spoofers. If you find out spammers are using your organization’s name in their messages, it may not be possible to find out who is behind them to file suit. However, you can report these messages to law enforcement and, if severe, engage in a public relations and education campaign to ensure your customers know these did not come from you.
