Domain security and email deliverability has become a significant area of growth for the IT channel in recent years. Mike Anderson, Global Channel Manager at EasyDMARC joins our Executive Q&A to discuss issues, strategy, and channel opportunity.
At our last Managed Services Summit in Amsterdam, we had four different vendors in this space. Can you tell me why Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) has become such a hot topic?
Phishing and spoofing have always been a huge issue for organizations. They cause financial losses, decrease customer trust, and damage the brand image.
While COVID-19 and working from home accelerated the growth of phishing and spoofing, there have always been natural ebbs and flows of dynamics in social engineering, especially phishing attacks. Phishing websites have grown almost eightfold compared to Q2, 2020.
In simple terms, what is DMARC?
If you have a domain, you need DMARC. It is an email authentication protocol that guards you against phishing and boosts your email deliverability.
Think of implementing DMARC as giving the deliverability doorman at a club a list of authorized senders so he knows who can send emails from your domain. When the doorman sees an email from an unauthorized sender, he immediately flags it as spam, keeping your domain's reputation clean and increasing the likelihood of your emails reaching the inbox.
The number of valid DMARC records grew by 84% in December 2021 compared to December 2020. However, adoption rates are far from ideal. Our in-house research shows that most industries are unprotected against phishing and spoofing. For example, among the 9,935,024 .org domains we researched, only 3.98% have ever implemented DMARC, 30.68% of which reached the "reject" policy. A mere 1.22% of the sample size is fully protected against phishing.
What is the opportunity for the MSP and reseller community?
It's straightforward for resellers – selling DMARC is a low-touch path to pure revenue.
As for MSPs, the speed of DMARC adoption is growing, and they can catch the moment and ensure sustainable revenue, profitability, and customer stickiness.
The first and most robust growth opportunity is selling to existing clients. It's no secret that new client acquisition is more expensive than selling new services to existing clients. MSPs don't have to search far – they already have the client database. Regardless of size, every business needs DMARC: they just don't know it yet. The goal should be to make the clients understand they need it. MSPs must also do it fast before the clients start looking for other services.
The second part of the opportunity is that DMARC is pretty technical. Many small businesses have no resources or knowledge to deploy it themselves. As a knowledgeable service provider, an MSP can be the trustworthy partner these companies seek.
Tell us a bit about EasyDMARC – Who are you? And what do you offer to channel partners?
EasyDMARC is a global cloud-native DMARC provider with a solid understanding of the MSP and reseller models. The domain count for our platform is 70K and growing.
Our product is evolving to accommodate MSP and enterprise needs. Two of the latest product releases added convenience and streamlined the multitenant management within the platform. Permission Management reimagined the whole concept of our product, while the New Alert Manager aims to keep users on top of the changes in their domain infrastructure.
MSPs sometimes lack stability in the number of clients buying the service from month to month. As we understand the strain of the unknown, we've built a simple, pay-per-domain monthly subscription model. This no-nonsense approach to billing allows MSPs to sell EasyDMARC services like a consulting agreement to fix DMARC or include it in a larger cybersecurity overview package.
What are the areas that differentiate you from the growing number of vendors within this space?
We don't leave our MSP and reseller partners out in the wild. As a DMARC vendor, we train you from the get-go so you can go after revenue as soon as possible.
To accomplish this goal, we start with an initial session with one of our support engineers to learn the ins and outs of our platform. This is supported by training videos for future reference, Knowledge base articles and 24/7 support.
In addition to the basic marketing materials, we also offer the "Marketing Extra Program," a huge library of marketing and sales assets you can use while selling DMARC to your clients.
