…At least according to “a report published today by Marketing Sherpa.”:http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=27474 And cultural differences extend to the online world – we’re more wired and we spend more time online than our neighbours to the south. We are, according to Marketing Sherpa, “an online market ripe for picking”. The challenges – two languages, tougher privacy laws, and lagging adoption of ecommerce. The opportunities – if you can get around the obstacles – a strong Canadian dollar that allows US retailers to be more competitive and a GDP worth over a trillion dollars. The report also contains some general suggestions for US companies marketing to Canadian consumers, including specific advice for email campaigns, search campaigns and postal direct mail.
While I agree wholeheartedly with much of the information presented, I have to say I’m not 100% on-side with the email numbers – our own client results differ significantly from those reported as “Canadian standard” email response rates. On the one hand, we would consider the 25% open rates reported in one section of the report concerningly low for a newsletter campaign. On the other hand, the 55% average reported by IAB seems optimistic given the limited budgets and resources most of our Canadian clients struggle with. Are the numbers out of context? It isn’t geographical – our client lists include subscribers from across the country. Even so, misleading numbers aren’t the real story here.
Category: E-mail Marketing
Since email began in the early 90’s, there’s been a total revolution in the inbox. First it was all about being a cool new way to almost instantly communicate with anyone and everyone who happened to have an email address! Some emails, those with that real wow factor, even included pictures!
Over the years, best practices, industry norms and trends have evolved. Today, email marketing is a tangled web of permissions, HTML coding and design, ISPs open rates, subject lines etc. Because of this, it’s important for email marketers to educate themselves on the latest best practices. It’s also one of the reasons “cardcommunications”:http://www.cardcommunications.com (my company) has published its first-ever quarterly trends report.
Having recently attended a few conferences such as the Visa E-Commerce summit and “Mesh”:http://www.meshconference.com, I’ve realized the speakers I liked were ones who discussed how they dealt with disaster. So here is my turn in the confession booth – Let’s hope no one from “work”:http://www.searstravel.ca is reading.
Last year we sent an email for a St. Patrick’s Day promotion. ‘Leave the New World for the Old World’ with great travel deals to Ireland. All our i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. We clicked send and the message went off into cyberspace.
Later the same evening I got a panicky call. *Every one of the over 50k subscribers on the list got the email 8 times.* One of those ‘oh crap’ moments in my career.
After heart palpitations and fear of black-listing by ISPs, it was damage-control time. First we stopped sending email. We then met first thing in the morning to figure out what went wrong. Prior to the meeting, my inbox already had messages from my boss and SVP asking what had happened.
At the meeting the IT guys were expecting a public execution. There was a bug in the email system that caused the problem. They apologized for the screw-up. Rather than finger-pointing we looked at fixing the situation. (Yes, I did have to restrain myself at first.)