The Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) will have a far-reaching effect on the world of marketing and makes having a great marketing automation service invaluable.
CASL is a law that that applies to all commercial electronic messages (CEM). It requires all recipients to provide opt-in consent, before a CEM can be sent. The law not only applies to email message, but it also applies to SMS text messages, instant messages and messages sent through social media platforms.
If a business is in the United States, but interacts with customers, clients and/or employees in Canada, then it’s also required to adhere to this law.
The new law poses a problem for traditional email service providers (ESPs) like Mailchimp and Constant Contact in Canada. However, this law truly makes marketing automation more valuable, not less.
Businesses must be even more efficient with uncovering each lead, more effective at tracking their behavior, more diligent in recording consent and they must arm sales people with more information to close the deal, since email might play less of a role. Obviously, marketing automation does all of these things very well.
The Importance of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is more than just sending emails. It’s also about notifying sales people regarding a lead’s behavior even if the salesperson can’t communicate with the lead via email. The salesperson can see when the lead is exhibiting buying behavior, call them up and proactively reach out to them.
Even with the law in place, marketing departments are faced with the issue of having to use the same marketing budget, while also being tasked with generating the same number of leads. In order for the marketing department to be successful, it needs to be more efficient with everything else it’s doing.
Marketing automation is setup to make your marketing efforts more efficient. Using marketing automation will allows the marketing department to identify more leads due to anonymous visitor tracking (VisitorID).
A workflow can be created to notify sales, which will allow the salesperson to execute on leads.
Valuable SharpSpring Features
CASL makes sending mass emails difficult. However, that obstacle makes having the following marketing automation features more valuable:
- VisitorID identifies every leads that comes to a company’s website. Including the location of the lead, name and the device the lead used to visit the website.
- SharpSpring tracks every lead and can send sales notifications to the sales team allowing them to call leads that exhibit buying behavior.
- Dynamic forms allow you to receive consent from a lead. Maintaining records of consent via web and form tracking can prove that the visitor gave consent if an issue does arise. SharpSpring can prove this via database records, but a list imported into an ESP cannot be verified by the ESP.
- Optimizing campaigns through analytics. Leads are very hard to come by and harder to convert, so optimization becomes even important.
A company should do all this with one, unified system, so records are kept, leads are nurtured, sales are notified and nothing falls through the cracks.
Alternative Method of Receiving Consent
A tactic like gated content can be used to obtain the express permission of the user as required by the law. Gated content is offered behind a trackable form that can require the user’s consent to receive emails from the company. Then greater emphasis can be placed on empowering sales staff with the knowledge needed to close each lead in the funnel.
Marketing automation is designed for tracking lead interests, buying behavior and sending sales staff behavior-based notifications. Finally, dynamic forms, comprehensive analytics and anonymous web visitors all work to maximize the leads coming into the top of the funnel. All of these will give businesses an opportunity to acquire the opt-in permission necessary to contact a lead through email.
