Blog : Email marketing

This category covers articles, best practices and tips on how to effectively optimize your email marketing program in order to establish and maintain sustainable and profitable relationships with your customers.When properly used, email marketing is amongst the most powerful media at your disposal. However, there are many technical challenges that must be addressed. These challenges are often not well understood by marketers. This is why many organizations fail to see the expected results materialize.
Email Is Boring. That’s Why It Still Works.
Mark Morin

Email Is Boring. That’s Why It Still Works.

Why reliability beats novelty in travel marketing — and what it reveals about email marketing

For more than a decade, marketing conversations have been dominated by novelty. New platforms promise higher engagement, faster growth, and greater reach. Each year seems to introduce another channel that claims to outperform everything that came before it. This raises a broader question that continues to surface across the industry: why email marketing still works in an environment obsessed with new channels.

In that environment, email can seem almost unremarkable. It lacks the immediacy of social media, the algorithmic intrigue of emerging platforms, and the cultural energy that surrounds the latest marketing trend. It rarely generates headlines, and it almost never feels new.

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Seasonality Is Not an Excuse for Bad CRM
Mark Morin

Seasonality Is Not an Excuse for Bad CRM

Why long gaps make relationship marketing more important

Seasonality is often treated as a convenient alibi in travel marketing. When bookings slow, campaigns pause. When guests disappear from view, communication goes quiet, explained away with a familiar shrug: It’s seasonal. The implication is subtle but powerful. If demand is cyclical, then silence feels justified.

But this logic mistakes rhythm for absence. Seasonality does not weaken the case for CRM. It strengthens it. In travel, long gaps between purchases are not an exception or an edge case. They are the structural reality of the category. That reality makes relationship marketing harder, certainly, but also more necessary. When time stretches between moments of intent, continuity becomes the work.

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Hotels, Attractions, and DMOs Don’t Have the Same Travel CRM Challenge
Mark Morin

Hotels, Attractions, and DMOs Don’t Have the Same Travel CRM Challenge

Different data, different mandates, same strategic blind spots

Travel CRM is often discussed as if every organization is facing the same fundamental challenge: collect guest data, automate communications, drive bookings, repeat. It is a clean, reassuring narrative. It is also a misleading one.

Hotels, attractions, and destination marketing organizations all operate within the same travel ecosystem, but they do not begin from the same place. They do not have access to the same data, they are not accountable for the same outcomes, and they are not responsible for the same moments in the guest journey. Treating them as interchangeable CRM actors leads to strategies that feel technically correct but operationally strained, and to programs that underperform not because of execution, but because of misalignment.

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The Guest Journey Is Not a Funnel
Mark Morin

The Guest Journey Is Not a Funnel

Why linear models fail cyclical travel behavior across the guest journey

For years, travel marketing has relied on a familiar mental model: the funnel. Guests enter at the top, progress steadily downward, and eventually convert. It’s tidy, measurable, and reassuring. And in travel, it consistently misrepresents how decisions are actually made.

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Relationship Marketing vs Transactional Thinking in Travel
Mark Morin

Relationship Marketing vs Transactional Thinking in Travel

Why short-term optimization quietly undermines long-term guest value

Two Ways of Seeing the Guest

In travel, relationship marketing is built interaction by interaction. And every interaction carries meaning.

A confirmation email, a pre-arrival reminder, a post-stay message. Each one shapes how a guest perceives a brand, not just in the moment, but over time. Yet many travel organizations approach these interactions through a narrow lens, optimizing for the next conversion rather than the ongoing relationship.

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Email Marketing Is Not a Channel. It Is a Relationship System
Mark Morin

Email Marketing Is Not a Channel. It Is a Relationship System

Email marketing is often framed as a contradiction.

Depending on who you ask, it is either a relationship marketing channel built on trust, permission, and long-term value, or a high‑performance sales tool optimized for conversions, revenue, and measurable results.

This framing is not only misleading; it actively limits how organizations design, measure, and deploy email programs.

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Why Pay for an Audience You Already Own?
Mark Morin

Why Pay for an Audience You Already Own?

How over-investing in paid media and SMS can quietly erode your most effective channel.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched marketing budgets shift in a very predictable direction, particularly in how brands invest in and activate their owned audience. More money toward paid digital media, more experimentation with SMS, and more pressure to diversify channels and show visible activity. The intention is understandable. Marketing leaders want to be where their customers are, and no one wants to appear stuck relying on a channel that some still dismiss as old-fashioned.

What is less often examined is what this shift costs when the audience is already known, already reachable, and already owned.

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Email benchmarking tool – are you an email superhero?
Mark Morin

Email benchmarking tool – are you an email superhero?

Why you should give our email benchmarking tool a try?

You don’t realize how great you really are unless you compare with what others are doing. It’s time to come out of the shadows and claim your share of the recognition you deserve. It’s time to measure how well you’re doing. To figure out how to take your email program to the next level. How does your program measure up? What parts are great, and what parts are simply Meh? Beyond opens and clicks, what do you need to look at to measure your email program performance? That’s precisely why we created this simple, and we hope fun, email benchmarking tool. Use it to evaluate your email superpowers and set yourself on the path to glory.

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Five strategies for a healthy marketing database
Mark Morin

Five strategies for a healthy marketing database

If you want a healthy marketing database, don’t be shy

A healthy marketing database requires constant upkeep, or it will degrade fast. The causes of this degradation are many: Customers become inactive. Implied consents expire. People unsubscribe. As a result, your relationship marketing program falters, no longer delivering the sales growth needed to ensure the continued prosperity of the company.

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A/B Testing – How to implement a winning strategy
Mark Morin

A/B Testing – How to implement a winning strategy

Yes, we can learn to love statistics and A/B testing

I am a big fan of optimization and A/B testing. But that was not always the case. When I was studying for my MBA at HEC in the 1980s, the most challenging courses I enrolled in was Statistics and Probabilities. This course, loaded with obscure equations, was meaningless gibberish to me. And I couldn’t see how it could be useful in real life except maybe for surveys.

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Flèche d’or 2019 award nominees – our three campaigns
Mark Morin

Flèche d’or 2019 award nominees – our three campaigns

Each year, the Quebec Marketing Association (formerly the AMR) holds a competition to select the top marketing campaigns created by prominent brands and their agencies. Year after year, Strategies does quite well in the standings. Last year, we were awarded Best omnichannel marketing campaign. The year before, we were honoured as the Agency of the year.

This year, we have three campaigns nominated for an award (out of three submissions) for three of our clients. Check out the videos below to learn more about the nominees.

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Apology emails: How to turn an Oops! into an opportunity
Mark Morin

Apology emails: How to turn an Oops! into an opportunity

Despite all your best efforts to avoid them, sometimes errors slit through your carefully-planned safety net. Maybe it’s “just” a typo. Or a small design flaw. In which case, you simply make a mental note to pay more attention in the future and move on to the next project. But when it’s a more serious issue, like a broken link, the wrong price, or an email sent to the wrong audience, you only have one option: send an apology email or “oops!” email to your customers.

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Email quality assurance – Flawless QA helps prevent campaign blunders
Mark Morin

Email quality assurance – Flawless QA helps prevent campaign blunders

It’s easy to forget about quality assurance (QA) with all the time pressures to get your emails out the door. Easy despite the fact that it is one of the most important steps in the creative process. Easy to forget that after having invested tons of time, energy and dollars in designing the perfect campaign, the simplest of errors can trip you up.

Which is why we wrote this post on how to do effective email campaign QA:

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Email marketing defined – everything you need to know!
Mark Morin

Email marketing defined – everything you need to know!

Email marketing is a powerful tool…if you know what you’re doing

Email marketing is sometimes equated with sending out newsletters. But it’s so much more! Simply put, Email Marketing is the systematic and structured use of email in order to initiate, build and consolidate a relationship between brands and people. Email is the most popular media for Relationship Marketing. This is largely because of its impact, its ROI and its ability to grow sales.

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Email marketing essentials – What you need to know to get it right!
Mark Morin

Email marketing essentials – What you need to know to get it right!

Make sure you nail the fundamentals

If you want an email marketing program that really delivers results, you need to get the technical basics right. The most beautiful content won’t drive results if it doesn’t get delivered. According to ReturnPath email deliverability report, an average of 20% of all email messages never reach their audience. Generally because they’re blocked or diverted from the inbox.

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CASL: Canadian anti-spam legislation – Are you truly ready?
Mark Morin

CASL: Canadian anti-spam legislation – Are you truly ready?

Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL), also known as C-28, comes into full force on July 1 of this year. If you’re sending emails to Canada and haven’t already taken steps to prepare for CASL, you have a few short days to get ready to comply with what is considered to be the most stringent anti-spam legislation in the world. And there’s a major incentive to do so: fines of up to $10 million for a business, or $1 million for an individual.

CASL and the concept of consent

At the heart of CASL is the need to obtain consent – either explicit or implied – in order to be able to send Commercial Electronic Messages (CEMs) to your customers, prospects or subscribers.

Explicit consent is consent which is given verbally or in writing by a contact, using various means including a web page that provides a check box (which cannot be pre-checked) or a subscribe button.

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About the Author

Mark Morin
Mark Morin
A passionate marketing communications strategist with over 35 years of experience creating powerful, effective and results-oriented campaigns, programs and content for national, international and global brands in beauty and cosmetics, tourism and travel, financial services, technology, business-to-business and more. /// Évangélisateur relationnel, auteur et formateur, plus d’une trentaine d’années d’expérience pratique dans la création et la gestion de campagnes de marketing relationnel.

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