Top 5 Tips for CASL Compliance

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) has its second anniversary on July 1st but a surprising number of Canadian businesses still haven’t taken the time to update their email practices and customer databases to ensure they are compliant with the law.   If you are one of them, it’s time to stop putting off the task.

Fines for violating CASL rules can be significant — as high as one million dollars for individuals and 10 million dollars for businesses.  The amount of the fines levied is at the sole discretion of the government, and so far, the government has signaled it is serious about penalizing CASL violators.  Several prominent companies have been fined for CASL violations including Rogers, Porter Airlines and Compu-finder, but smaller businesses should also take heed, as they are not exempt from the rules.

On top of this, when CASL’s transitional period ends on July 1st 2017 there will also be the threat of civil actions for CASL violations.  If you think […]

Landing Pages for Financial Services

Landing pages for financial services are an efficient and effective way of providing value to visitors in exchange for their information. Once integrated with other digital marketing strategies, they give you the ability to increase conversion rates and funnel efficiency.
Best Practices: Landing Pages for Financial Services
Read on to get some best practice tips to optimize your landing pages so that they convert at a higher rate compared to the financial services industry average of five percent [1]:

Understand Your Visitor’s Frame of Mind. 

By creating landing pages for financial services, you want meaningful conversions – not high bounce rates. This can only be done when you speak directly to your visitors, without judgement, but with an understanding and purpose.

Think from the perspective of your potential clients: what do they want? What are they feeling? If you were in their shoes, what would you be seeking? What would prompt you to take an action? Likewise, what would not?

Let’s do a fun little exercise to get […]

A Great Financial Services Blog

A great financial services blog provides relevant content to consumers in a way that inspires them to engage with your company. Ideally, this content doesn’t just cater to your existing customers, but brings in potential customers as well.

This is why we love Mawer’s Art of Boring blog!  Using creativity to engage with a wider audience generates leads. It is a commonly held belief that the topic of financial services is one that is not very exciting. However, Mawer capitalizes on this by transforming boring into an “art”. By flipping the switch on their business genre, companies are able to generate leads that would not typically eat up this type of content.
Example of a Great Financial Services Blog
This fact doesn’t escape them either. The irony of the name “The Art of Boring” itself references that this topic is considered “boring” by so many.

Yet the blog itself is immensely interesting!

By employing a lighter take on the topic of financial services, their content becomes more readable […]

5 new CASL takeaways straight from the Chairman of the CRTC

On March 22nd the Chairman of the CRTC, Mr. Jean-Pierre Blais, spoke to members of the Canadian Marketing Association in Toronto. Mr. Blais’ speech focused on Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and served to give marketers an idea of what to expect in the near future covering a variety of topics from cybersecurity, the imminent second phase of the CASL law, to the legislation’s scope.

We’ve gone ahead and distilled the talk into some key takeaways:
CASL is here to stay
In his speech to the CMA, Mr. Blais made reference to the idea that many marketers consider him their enemy, likely speaking to some of the negative feedback the CRTC has received from Canadian marketers about the legislation. The message was clear: CASL “is here to stay”. In fact, Mr. Blais believes these laws will only get tougher with time as electronic fraud becomes more prevalent.
Not slaying dragons
While CASL isn’t going anywhere, he was quick to allay some of the fears that the CRTC was going to use […]

Improve email performance by up to 20% with list cleaning.

Not many people get excited about cleaning, often because it involves a lot of dirty work. On the contrary, most people love that feeling when they look around their home and everything looks tidy, the air smells fresh and they can relax in a comfortable space. Of course, list cleaning does not exactly have the same effect but the results on your reporting are just as significant, if not even more positive. The problem is that because undeliverable email addresses or unengaged contacts do not surround you like a mess does in your home, you do not realize how much they are cluttering your database and distorting your statistics. Marketing success is measured in numbers therefore if your numbers are off than you cannot accurately determine what campaigns are working in your favour or not. List cleaning is an essential practice for successful email campaigns.

Let’s start by a review of what we mean by list cleaning. It seems different individuals […]

Hit your targets: Using data segmentation to increase your bottom line.

Targeted Marketing, in its most simplistic definition, is all about getting the right message to the right people, however we all know that achieving this is much more complex. Narrowing down your target, crafting your content and then manipulating your data is not a simple process. When it comes to email marketing, although it may be easier to broadcast your message out to your entire database and hope that the more people who are exposed to it, the more conversions you will get, this may actually hinder your brand perception among contacts that have no interest in the message. If you send every communication to your entire database, a large number of your contacts may get annoyed from receiving irrelevant information and choose to unsubscribe. Alternatively, when you send relevant content to contacts based on their areas of interest, geographic location and demographic variables, the probability of engagement and therefore conversion increases drastically. A targeted strategy will also reduce the […]

Businesses trouble ahead without CASL Compliance.

Is your business completely compliant with the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL)?
The Canadian Anti-Spam law (CASL) has been in effect since July 1, 2014 and businesses are still struggling with how to manage the rules properly. The Government has already served notice that it intends to come down hard on companies that have clearly not complied with the new law. A few companies have already been penalized for various infractions with the largest fine being $1.1 million dollars.
Try our Free CASL Business Audit Quiz
So are most businesses out of the danger zone when it comes to being penalized for non-CASL compliance? Far from it actually. The government has limited resources to follow up on anti-spam law complaints. However, there is another level of risk that many people are unaware of and that is the mighty consumer.

As of July 1st, 2017 consumers have the right to private action against companies that are not following the CASL rules. While many companies may believe there is […]

Drip-Drip-Sold: Nurturing Leads With Drip Campaigns

How do you know when your prospects are sale ready? Do you waste resources chasing leads that are not actually interested? Wouldn’t it be great if there was an automated process to nurture your leads and let you know when they are ready to approach? Enter the drip campaign. Send your leads a series of targeted emails depending on whether they open the previous one and get notified when they have made it through the entire process. At that point the apple will be ripe for picking and all you have to do is close. Alternatively, you will know if they are not sale ready and you have the opportunity to bring back their interest with targeted content for those that did not open the previous email.

How does this process work? The itracMarketer automation tool allows you to trigger actions based on specified conditions. For example, once the lead enters your database, an automatic welcome email is sent to them […]

Canadian Candidate’s Need a Crash Course on CASL

As we all know by now, failure to comply with the Canadian Anti spam Law comes with substantial penalties for Canadian businesses. So far we’ve seen this with a few different companies such as Compu-Finder, Plentyoffish Media Inc., and Porter Airlines.

With the upcoming federal election we decided to take a look at how some of the Canadian political parties managed their email compliance processes.

However, for some reason non-commercial organizations, such as political parties, are technically exempt from CASL, but we wanted to find out if Canada’s political parties are following the CASL legislation that they passed, so we put them to the test.

We signed up for the email lists of the Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats and Green Party.  The emails received from each party were then monitored for a two-week period (August 13 – August 28) to gauge their CASL compliance.

As part of this process, we carefully reviewed the key factors of each party’s communications including email collection forms, privacy policies, and […]

Improve Your Business With Surveys

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew exactly what your customers and clients were thinking about your business? Unfortunately, the internet of things has not yet tapped into the human brain so the next best thing is leveraging applications (or old school research) to find out more about your customers and what they are thinking. A survey is a perfect platform to get your customers thinking about your product and the best way to figure out what your customers are really thinking about your business.

You can easily create and send an effective survey directly in itracMarketer with our Survey Tool which will allow you to track all of the responses and set up marketing automation based on certain criteria.

Let’s take a look some reasons why marketers can benefit greatly from sending out a survey:

Feedback: The knowledge that you will gain from your customers answering questions about your business will be invaluable. Gaining their feedback will give you insight into what they […]