Email is the only marketing channel you own outright. No algorithm decides who sees it, no platform can price you out overnight, and it consistently returns more per dollar than anything else in the mix.
It's also the channel where the two worst failure modes are invisible.
Your emails can quietly stop arriving. Not landing in spam, but rejected at the server before anyone sees them, while your dashboard cheerfully reports them as sent. And in Canada specifically, your list-building practices can be illegal in ways that carry penalties most business owners would find hard to believe.
Both problems are fixable. Neither gets fixed by writing better subject lines.
Most email marketing advice you'll find online was written for the American market, and it will get you in trouble here.
The US CAN-SPAM Act is an opt-out regime. You can email someone cold and simply honour their unsubscribe request afterward. Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation works the opposite way. CASL requires consent, express or implied, before you send the first commercial message. It has been in force since July 2014, and it is widely described as the strictest law of its kind in the world.
The penalties are not symbolic. The CRTC can impose administrative monetary penalties up to $1 million per violation for an individual and up to $10 million per violation for an organization. CASL also extends liability personally to directors and officers who authorized or participated in a violation, and employers can be held responsible for what employees do within the scope of their work. Enforcement is shared between the CRTC, the Competition Bureau, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
Some practical consequences that catch Winnipeg businesses out:
A quick and important caveat: ITS Inc. is a software and marketing firm, not a law firm. We build systems that support compliance, document consent properly, and follow the rules as we understand them. For a formal opinion on your specific situation, talk to a lawyer. We're happy to work alongside yours.
The technical bar for sending email rose sharply, and a lot of businesses haven't caught up.
Google and Yahoo announced new bulk sender requirements in late 2023 and began enforcing them in February 2024. Microsoft followed with its own enforcement starting in May 2025. The requirements are broadly aligned:
The threshold is roughly 5,000 messages per day to personal consumer mailboxes. Two details people miss: the count aggregates across your subdomains, and once your domain is classified as a bulk sender, that classification doesn't lapse when your volume drops.
The consequence of failing is worse than most people expect. Non-compliant mail can be rejected outright at the SMTP level rather than filtered into a junk folder. It bounces. Nobody sees it, and depending on your platform, it may not be obvious that anything is wrong.
The other thing worth knowing about the 0.3% ceiling: at low volume it's easy to trip. Send 10,000 emails, and it takes only 30 people hitting "report spam" to cross the line. One badly targeted campaign to a stale list can damage a sending reputation that takes months to rebuild.
This is the part where being a software company matters more than being a marketing agency.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are DNS records. Fixing alignment means understanding how your sending domain relates to your ESP's infrastructure. Interpreting DMARC aggregate reports means parsing XML. Moving from p=none to p=quarantine to p=reject without breaking legitimate mail from your CRM, your invoicing system, and whatever else quietly sends on your behalf requires knowing what all of those systems are and how they authenticate.
Most marketing agencies email this list to your IT provider and wait.
ITS Inc. is a software company that does marketing. What that means here:
Segmentation, lifecycle mapping, sending cadence, and what each list is actually for. Most underperforming programs are sending the same message to everyone.
Welcome sequences, abandoned cart, post-purchase, re-engagement, renewal and reorder reminders, lead nurture. These run continuously and typically generate a disproportionate share of email revenue relative to the effort they take to build.
Templates that render properly across clients including Outlook, which remains the most reliable way to break an email design. Copy written to get a reply or a click, not to fill space.
Signup forms that collect the right consent, record what was agreed to and when, and store it in a way you could actually produce if asked. Plus expiry tracking for implied consent, which almost nobody has.
Suppression management, bounce handling, sunset policies for dormant contacts, and re-permission campaigns. Removing people who never open is counterintuitive and it improves results.
Authentication, reputation, spam placement testing, and complaint diagnosis. Usually the first engagement, because there's no point optimizing content that isn't arriving.
Revenue and pipeline attribution, not just open rates. Open tracking became substantially less reliable after Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, and any agency still leading their reports with open rate is telling you something about their measurement.
Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Brevo, Customer.io, or something custom. The right choice depends on your data, your volume, and what it needs to connect to, not on which platform pays the best affiliate commission.
Email suits businesses with repeat purchase cycles, long sales cycles, or an audience worth staying in front of. In this market, that tends to mean:
A note specific to Winnipeg: the market is small enough that reputation travels. An aggressive email program that annoys people here has social consequences a Toronto business wouldn't feel. Restraint is a competitive advantage in a market where your customers know each other.
Authentication status, sending reputation, complaint and bounce rates, list health, consent documentation, and a review of existing flows. You get the findings regardless of whether you hire us.
Authentication, suppression handling, consent capture, and list cleanup. This phase is invisible to your customers, and it's the phase that determines whether anything else works.
Lifecycle flows first, because they run indefinitely once built and are the highest-return work available.
Campaign calendar, production, sending, testing, and reporting.
Segmentation refinement, testing, and periodic re-audits of deliverability. Sender reputation isn't set once.
Yes, and increasingly so relative to alternatives. As search results end without a click more often and ad costs keep climbing, an owned list you can reach directly has become more valuable, not less.
Consent before sending commercial electronic messages to Canadian addresses, clear sender identification, and a functional unsubscribe mechanism that's honoured promptly. Consent can be express (someone actively opted in) or implied (arising from an existing relationship, for a limited period). Records matter, because unprovable consent is functionally the same as no consent. This is a summary, not legal advice.
Generally no, with narrow exceptions. This is the single biggest difference between Canadian and American practice and the one that most often needs correcting when we take over an existing program.
Usually. The cause is typically authentication problems, poor list hygiene, complaint rates, or reputation damage from a previous campaign. The audit identifies which. Recovery from reputation damage takes longer than fixing configuration, so the answer is often "yes, over about eight to twelve weeks."
Depends on what you sell and what your data looks like. E-commerce usually points toward Klaviyo. B2B with a sales team often points toward HubSpot. Simpler needs are well served by cheaper tools. We'll recommend based on fit, and we don't take platform commissions.
More often than most businesses are comfortable with, less often than most agencies suggest. Twice a month is a reasonable starting cadence for many B2B senders, with e-commerce typically running higher. What matters more is consistency and relevance.
Either. Some clients want full production; others want the strategy, automation, and technical layer while their team writes. Both work.
Yes, and it's a common starting point. The usual approach is a re-permission campaign to establish clean express consent, combined with suppression of contacts we can't document. It shrinks the list. It also means what remains is legal and engaged, which typically improves performance rather than hurting it.
Serving Winnipeg and communities across Manitoba — see all our service areas.
We’ll check whether your authentication is configured correctly, whether your mail is actually being delivered, and where your consent practices sit relative to CASL. You’ll get a written summary of what we find and what we’d fix first.
No charge, and no obligation.
Serving Winnipeg and Manitoba.
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