2374 - The Canadian Email Marketing Playbook for Compliance and Engagement with Cyberimpact's Geoffrey Blanc

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Jeffrey Blanc. Jeffrey, you are the general manager at Cyber Impact. You're found on the web at cyberimpact.com. We're going to be talking about email marketing in this conversation. But before we get to that, Jeffrey, I always love learning what, you know, high-level leaders and, you know, founders and people that, you know, they're passionate about what they do generally tend to be multi-passionate. And, you know, a lot of people have some hobbies or things that they really geek out on.

1:23What have you been into lately? I'm a really passionate guy about airplanes. So I really like everything that related to airplanes. Yeah. When you say airplanes, what does that mean? Flying them or studying them or watching them? Well, I think that's the end goal there is to pass a pilot license there. That's going to come in the future for sure. But right now, I know pretty much everything that needs to be learned about airplanes. You know, my brother works in the airplane industry. So I've learned so much from him. But everything passionate, I'm passionate about everything. Like every time I take an airplane, I have to record every time we lift off and then the landing, everything.

2:05I do like so many videos. I live right next to the airport. So I go pretty often just to watch airplanes there. So it's really a passion. And then I watch a lot of different documentaries as well on that. Has there, what, have there been any technical advancements over the past couple of years that you, that most people aren't aware of? In the airplane industry? In the aerospace and, yeah. I think it's just like new sets of different airplanes that are happening on the market. Like, you know, we went from four-engine airplane to two-engine airplane. So we're losing, like, the Boeing 47, the Airbus 380 there to go to smaller planes that are more efficient.

2:56So it's kind of boring, but it's very interesting to see that to get, like, an airplane that goes, like, the distance there. You don't need, like, a four-engine plane there. Well, very cool. I would imagine you watch a lot of YouTube videos, too. Yeah, I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I got to tell you, I watch 20 co-ed. I think the worst that I can do is I watch those. I don't know if you ever watched that, but May Day there. So you get all the aircraft incident, but I'll do that before taking the airplane. So it's kind of a stupid thing that I do, but it's stronger than me there. I have to watch those there.

3:35I think it's just reassuring to know that it's still very secure to take the airplane there. Yeah. I know that, especially in the year or two previous, there were some incidents that definitely grabbed some headlines. Yes. Do you think Boeing's got that figured out now? I think so. I think it's a sad story, but I think they got it figured out. Yeah. Good. Good, good, good. All right. Well, Jeffrey, let's talk about Cyber Impact. What is Cyber Impact? So Cyber Impact is a Canadian email marketing platform where basically we send tons of email. You use our system if you want to do any newsletter marketing informations.

4:23It's your go-to tool for any email marketing that you want to do within your company. And what makes you different than a lot of the other email solutions or marketing platforms out there? Yeah, so first it's true to say that there's like tons of different companies that could do email marketing. What makes our platform different is the compliance that we are doing according to the different laws across Canada. So we work a lot with the different government instance to make sure that our platform is compliant to anything related to, and it's more specific, but we have the CASEL law in Canada. We have the PPETA, the Law 25, and also the GDPR is also affecting us because we have a lot of European visitors.

5:16So you have to be also GDPR compliant. So I would imagine you know pretty well differences between, I'm based in the United States, and obviously you work with a lot of Canadian clients, including government agencies as well. What are the biggest or what differences should someone know regarding email marketing laws between the two countries? Yeah, so in the US, you have the can-spam law there, which is very simple. It's mostly having a subscription mechanism on it. In some states, I don't know all of them, but I know the states of California has a pretty rigid law that is comparable to Quebec law in Canada.

6:10that is going to regulate a little bit more the way you collect that data and the way you handle data as well. Now, if I just go back, so United States, you have CanSpan. In Canada, we have CASEL. The main difference is that in Canada, you have to get an express or an implied consent from anyone that you're adding to your list. So you cannot send email to someone that you don't have like some sort of consent. And that is not something that is applicable to U.S. people that are using like any software. Now, what you have to know is if you are sending emails to a Canadian resident, you have to apply the CASEL law.

6:53So that is something very important that not everyone is aware. And especially it's super important for any company that are targeting any clients based in Canada. And same thing, you know, So that's where it gets a little bit complicated. So you have Canada-wide, and then you have all different provinces across Canada. And all those provinces, they have different laws that apply. And one of the provinces where I live in Quebec has a new law called the Law 25, which is stricter than, you know, Castle. And the Law 25 is going to ask an express consent. An express consent, to put it in short term, is when you do a double opt-in, that's an express consent.

7:35So you ask someone to subscribe to your newsletter, but then after that, you're sending an email to confirm that subscription. That's a double opt-in, and then you get that express consent. So Quebec is requiring anyone that wants to send email to get that express consent. Wow. Okay. Yeah, good to know. Does that apply for, yeah, I mean, I guess, I mean, it does. It gets pretty complicated. Like if I'm a, you know, my company's based in Bolivia or Mexico or, you know, the Philippines or something like that, you also have to abide by if you're sending email to Canadian residents, you got to play by the rules in Canada.

8:12Is that it? Well, it's the same thing I was saying. GDPR, which regulates the European Europe in general, is also very complicated. So when you do email marketing, you know, we tend to see, you know, locally what we can do. But as soon as you want an expense sent to Canada or anywhere around the world, you need to make sure that you're aware of the different laws are applicable there. And that's very important because it's not where you are, but it's more where your client are exactly. So, like I said, if they're in Canada, they're in Europe, you need to apply the specific law from those countries there.

8:53All right. So, where are we? We're now having this conversation. It's beginning in 2026. What is the state of the union for email marketing? So right now what we're seeing is there's a reinforcement from platform like Google, Gmail, Yahoo, where basically they're reinforcing the way they're doing the analysis of all emails are entering their ESP there. So what we're seeing is less batch and blast there. We want to see more personalized segmentations and all that there. So there's like a big change that is happening right now. We need to start sending emails that are a little bit more personalized, segmented.

9:41And also we need to be more caring about your clients or about your email list there. It has to be a little bit more, again, personalized in a sense. So that's the biggest thing. Now, the second thing is a lot about deliverability. So authentication, it's more technical, but authentication, SPF, TKI, and DMARC, those are the standards that needs to be applied. It seems pretty simple, but a lot of companies are still not doing that. In 2026, what we're seeing is a lot of anti-spam software within companies. So there's two things. There's the free ESP, they're like Google, Gmail, Yahoo. And then there's all those anti-spam software within, you know, corporation and companies.

10:30So what we're seeing is those anti-spam software are pretty strong. So they're going to be looking at your email entirely, clicking all the different links and basically deciding if that email is passing or not through the inbox. So you have to make sure that you're using a proper software, proper configuration, that your content is not, you know, spammy or anything like that. And then, you know, not crossing your finger, but you wish to pass that anti-spam software and to land inside the inbox. So there's more attention that needs to be put into your content and more attention that needs to be put also into your contact list.

11:13One of the things that we saw also is not the size of the contact list that matters because if you're sending, let's say, for example, to 50 ,000 contacts and out of those 50 ,000 contacts, only 10 ,000 open your email, then you have a bigger chance of being classified as spam because you're basically just blasting emails without having the interest there. So the interest is also the keyword there. You have to make sure that your emails are interesting and people are opening it because those are key items that software are going to be looking at in order to classify. Is it a spam or is it a regular email there that needs to be put inside the inbox?

11:56Wow. So always be earning that. I mean, always be earning that open rate with everything you send. And relationship is really important. You have to establish that relationship. I still believe that email marketing is one of the best tools that you could use in marketing. But you have to change the way you're doing it to make it more human in terms of the approach and the content that you're sending. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, again, I think enough of us have been burned on social media. You know, we put a lot of, you know, maybe historically put a lot of eggs in that basket. and then just got completely punished.

12:37Email to me feels like a little bit more of an honest meritocracy than does social media, which is, at the end of the day, your average platform is, they're serving themselves. They want to extract as much money as possible. And that doesn't necessarily always line up with what we want to do and what our hope is, especially if we think, well, hey, I've earned a decent following here. I was like, yeah, great. Well, it's not yours. It's also like a big topic that I do in different speak that I've done in the past two years. You know, social media, you're renting your audience. And email marketing, it's an asset.

13:17It belongs to you. So I really like social media, but you have to make those two work together. Every effort that you're putting in social media, make sure that it's also paying off in grabbing emails and making sure that people are subscribing to your list because you never know what's going to happen, right? Everything happened like in the last year. We didn't know what was happening with TikTok. We didn't, you know, X completely changed everything. Like half of the people left X for something else, you know? So there's always something that is happening. Just lately, if you look at LinkedIn, all your stats are going down.

13:52What's happening, nobody knows, but everything's going down. The only assets that it's not really changing, it's the email marketing. So you need to put a little bit more emphasis on that in order to grow your list and make sure that you have something like an assets that is going to be valuable and that is going to help you, you know, make more sales or just promote more product and all that. Yeah. Well, Jeffrey Blanc, the website cyberimpact.com. Share for a friend that's listening right now. Obviously, it looks as though you can get started for free. Your pricing is very, very competitive. You know, who do you like?

14:32So if someone is using another email platform, what is the kind of the standard, I want to say pitch, but, you know, the USP that you would say, well, listen, here's why you should demo our platform. If you're using another program, like, say, by MailChimp or, you know, AWeber or whatever, what do you typically say? So first of all, platform, easy of use. And then going with us, you would save money because we're a little bit cheaper there. And we do full migration for free. So, you know, it's painless to come to Cyber Impact. We take care of everything. We do migration from MailChimp or other system.

15:12And then you could migrate to Cyber Impact. And, you know, by joining our platform, it's good for Canadian, American clients there. It's the perfect tool. We also have landing pages. We have new features coming up. So it gives you like a one and all tool at the same place there. I love it. Cyberimpact.com. And Jeffrey Blanc, you're the general manager. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much, Josh. Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, This show is designed for you.

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