If you want to protect sensitive data while working in large email marketing teams and understand that the right solutions should focus on user management and system security, this article will help you identify the key aspects to consider. Learn the essential steps to prevent data leaks and safeguard accounts from unauthorized access.
Why you need to consider security challenges in team collaboration
In email marketing, teams rely on various tools — from email editors to ESPs and CRM systems. These platforms store critical business data, client information (if you’re an agency), and subscriber contact details that must be protected from cybercriminals and unauthorized access.
When collaborating in a team, you may face several security threats, including the following:
- unauthorized access by former employees who still have login credentials;
- compromised accounts due to password leaks caused by phishing or scam attacks;
- human errors that accidentally expose or mishandle sensitive data;
- access mismanagement, where team members receive permissions beyond their expertise, leading to security risks.
Collaboration on emails and data often exposes organizations to threats such as phishing attacks, data leakage, and unauthorized access. These risks are amplified when teams share sensitive information across platforms without robust security measures. Attackers increasingly leverage advanced tactics, such as ransomware and fileless attacks, to exploit collaboration tools and gain access to critical systems.
Consider the following important points to ensure that all your email marketing tools, teams, and processes are protected from such risks:
Implement centralized access management
Imagine a situation in which an email marketing team notices that a former employee, who still had access to the email editor, mistakenly logged in and changed the template or important blocks of all emails in the system. What can be done to prevent this from happening?
Managing user access efficiently is critical for maintaining security in large email marketing teams. Centralized access management provides a single control point for handling user permissions, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data.
Why centralized access management matters
Without a structured access management system, teams face security risks, such as former employees retaining access, unauthorized logins, and credential theft. Establishing clear user roles and access levels minimizes these threats while ensuring that the right people have the appropriate permissions.
Centralized access management is pivotal in mitigating these risks by providing a unified framework to control user permissions, monitor activity, and enforce strict authentication policies. With centralized access management, organizations can limit exposure by ensuring that only the right individuals can access sensitive data, thus minimizing the attack surface. Combining this with prevention-first security methods, such as preemptive cyber defense, also ensures that ransomware and advanced threats are stopped before they can exploit vulnerabilities in collaboration workflows.
Companies can balance seamless teamwork and robust protection by adopting a proactive approach to collaboration security.
Best practices for secure access management
- Define user roles and access levels: Assign permissions based on job responsibilities. For example, email designers should only have access to design tools, while managers can oversee campaign analytics and user management.
- Regularly audit and update permissions: Conduct routine access reviews to remove outdated accounts and adjust permissions as roles evolve. This helps prevent former employees or inactive users from maintaining access.
- Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) and two-factor authentication (2FA): MFA and 2FA add extra layers of security, making it significantly harder for cybercriminals to breach accounts. These methods require users to verify their identity with multiple credentials, such as a password plus a one-time code or biometric authentication.
For example, working in the Stripo editor, you can activate 2FA or MFA to protect your account from phishing, brute-force attacks, and credential abuse. Supported authentication methods include Google Authenticator, Authy, Duo, and email-based one-time codes.
While MFA and 2FA may add an extra step to the login process, they significantly enhance security and should be standard practice for all businesses handling sensitive email data.
Synchronize process management
One of the most striking examples of this problem is companies using separate ESPs for different regions struggling with inconsistent customer data — unsubscribes, preferences, and campaign performance indicators had to be collected from different platforms and brought together into a single system, which caused communication errors.
Companies rely on multiple applications to collect, store, and process data. While the average number of software as a service (SaaS) applications organizations use varies based on size and industry, some large enterprises use over 200 software tools. For instance, mid-market companies with 501 to 2,500 employees use an average of 255 apps.
With many organizations using large amounts of tools, ensuring consistent and secure data synchronization is essential to prevent errors, improve efficiency, and maintain security.
Why synchronization matters
Data synchronization consolidates and maintains consistency across different data sources, applications, and devices. Unlike a one-time data transfer, synchronization is continuous and ensures that both new and historical data remain accurate and up to date.
Best practices for synchronizing email marketing workflows
- Use automation tools — implement integrations that automatically sync access permissions and data across platforms, reducing manual errors.
- Maintain a single source of truth — store key data in a centralized system to ensure uniformity across all applications.
- Implement access controls — define clear roles and permissions to prevent unauthorized access to email marketing assets.
- Regular audits and monitoring — continuously track data flows and user access to detect and resolve inconsistencies before they become security risks.
By implementing these synchronization strategies, email marketing teams can work more efficiently, maintain data security, and improve campaign performance across all platforms.
Use single sign-on (SSO) for simplified and secure login
Practical case: An email marketing agency managing campaigns for multiple clients found that employees were struggling with passwords and weak credentials. Using too many passwords meant that they had to write them down and share them, which could lead to data loss.
Managing multiple login credentials can be a hassle for email marketing teams, leading to password fatigue and security risks. Single sign-on (SSO) streamlines authentication by allowing users to log in once and gain access to multiple tools without the need to repeatedly enter their credentials.
Why SSO matters for team efficiency and security
SSO minimizes data loss risks by centralizing authentication and ensuring a more seamless and secure login process.
How SSO improves security and efficiency:
- employees log in once and gain access to multiple applications, eliminating the need for repeated sign-ins. This saves time and reduces frustration;
- fewer password-related support requests mean IT teams can focus on more critical tasks instead of handling frequent password resets;
- centralized authentication minimizes weak password risks, and many SSO solutions integrate with MFA to add extra layers of protection.
However, it is important to understand that implementing an SSO carries some security risks that companies should be aware of:
Implementing single sign-on for email marketing platforms introduces conveniences and creates security risks if not properly managed. Threats such as credential theft, session hijacking, and lateral movement attacks can compromise the SSO ecosystem, giving attackers access to multiple systems once they breach a single account.
To mitigate these risks, companies should implement a layered security strategy. This includes enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a standard for all SSO logins, using runtime memory protection to prevent credential theft, and deploying a prevention-first security solution. Organizations must be able to automatically and preemptively stop advanced threats, such as fileless attacks and ransomware, ensuring that even sophisticated adversaries are blocked before they can gain a foothold.
Additionally, organizations should regularly audit and monitor SSO activity to identify abnormal behavior and ensure that permissions are updated as roles change. By combining SSO efficiency with robust preventative measures, businesses can secure their email marketing platforms without sacrificing productivity.
Best practices for implementing SSO in email marketing teams
- Integrate SSO with all email marketing tools: Ensure that all platforms your team relies on — such as email builders, analytics tools, and CRM systems — are linked to your SSO provider. This reduces login friction and keeps workflows uninterrupted.
- Align SSO with company-wide security policies: Implement SSO as part of a broader identity and access management (IAM) strategy. This includes setting up proper role-based permissions, enforcing strong authentication methods, and integrating multi-factor authentication (MFA) for added security.
- Monitor login activity for potential threats: Use security monitoring tools to track login patterns and detect unusual access attempts. This helps prevent unauthorized access and allows IT teams to respond quickly to security incidents.
SSO in action: Stripo’s implementation
Stripo has introduced SSO authentication, allowing teams to access the platform securely with a single login. This feature enhances security and convenience, ensuring that user data remain protected while making it easier for teams to navigate their tools efficiently. Stripo’s SSO supports authentication through industry-standard methods, such as SAML-based authentication tokens, ensuring seamless integration with company-wide security systems.
By implementing SSO, email marketing teams can create a more secure, efficient, and user-friendly work environment — where access is seamless, security is strengthened, and IT workload is reduced.
Assign roles that limit access based on responsibilities
An email marketing team at a SaaS company ran into trouble when a junior designer accidentally deleted a draft of an active campaign, resulting in data loss. How can team members collaborate while still keeping data secure?
In email marketing, assigning roles that limit access based on responsibilities is crucial for maintaining data security and enhancing team efficiency. By tailoring access levels to specific job functions, organizations ensure that team members interact only with the tools and information pertinent to their roles, thereby minimizing potential security risks and reducing the likelihood of errors.
Best practices for implementing custom roles:
- Define specific roles: Clearly delineate roles for marketers, designers, copywriters, proofreaders, and managers. This clarity ensures that each team member understands their responsibilities and access privileges.
- Adjust permissions based on project needs: Customize access levels to align with the requirements of individual projects, allowing flexibility while maintaining control over sensitive information.
- Apply least-privilege access principles: Grant team members the minimum access necessary to perform their duties effectively, reducing the risk of unauthorized actions.
- Update access levels regularly: As team structures evolve, periodically review and modify access permissions to reflect current responsibilities and prevent outdated access.
- Monitor activities with logs: Use activity logs to track user actions, enabling the identification and investigation of any unauthorized or suspicious behavior.
Implementing these practices safeguards data and streamlines the email production process, fostering a secure and efficient environment for all team members.
Automate user onboarding and offboarding to save time and enhance security
Managing user access efficiently is crucial to securing email marketing workflows. When new team members join or leave, manually granting and revoking permissions can lead to delays, human error, and security risks. For example, a growing fintech startup was rapidly scaling its marketing team but was struggling with manual employee onboarding and offboarding. An outgoing employee’s credentials would remain active for a long time, creating data security risks.
Automation ensures consistent access control, minimizes administrative workload, and reduces the likelihood of security breaches. By implementing structured onboarding and offboarding processes, businesses can maintain a secure, well-organized working environment while improving overall efficiency.
Best practices for automating user onboarding and offboarding by Brad LaPorte
Expert
Automating user onboarding and offboarding is critical to reducing human error and ensuring consistent security practices. However, improper implementation can lead to security gaps, such as orphaned accounts, excessive permissions, or delays in revoking access for former employees.
To prevent these risks, organizations should establish clear workflows for both onboarding and offboarding that include the following best practices:
- Adopt a zero-trust approach: Implement a “never trust, always verify” model to ensure that every access request is authenticated, authorized, and continuously monitored, even for internal users. This minimizes the risk of insider threats and unauthorized access.
- Role-based access control (RBAC): Assign permissions based on predefined roles to ensure that users can access only the necessary tools and data.
- Real-time access revocation: Automate the removal of all access privileges immediately upon offboarding to prevent unauthorized entry.
- Continuous monitoring: Use tools to monitor user activity and flag suspicious behavior, ensuring access privileges consistently align with business needs.
- Prevention-first security: Employ a preemptive cyber defense strategy to ensure that advanced threats targeting user accounts are blocked before they can exploit vulnerabilities.
By integrating these best practices with automation and preemptive security measures, organizations can prevent unauthorized access and maintain a secure environment for their email marketing teams.
Wrapping up
Keeping your email marketing team secure doesn’t have to come at the cost of efficiency. By implementing centralized access management, using SSO, synchronizing processes, assigning role-based permissions, and automating onboarding or offboarding, you create a system that protects your data while keeping workflows smooth. These security best practices help prevent unauthorized access, reduce human error, and ensure seamless collaboration.
The key is finding the right balance — tight enough controls to safeguard your campaigns but flexible enough to keep your team productive. Start by evaluating your current setup, identifying potential risks, and gradually introducing these strategies into your email marketing workflow. A secure and efficient system means fewer headaches, smoother operations, and, ultimately, better campaign results.
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