News
 International Trade Made Easy—Increase Your Sales Now
By Bob Hull, director of business development, Melissa Data
If your company is based in the USA and you’re not
selling your products in Canada, chances are you’re
missing out on a lot of sales.
International trade isn’t as complicated as you may
think – even for small businesses. And there’s a lot
of helpful information on the Internet you can find
with a quick Google search.
Granted, some products and services may not be a
good fit, but you won’t know unless you give it some
serious thought. You should be thinking about Canada
right now. Their economy and culture is similar to
ours in many ways and they’re right next door.
Picking the low fruit – your best opportunity for
a quick sales boost
If you market your products over the Internet – and
what you offer is relevant outside the USA – you
should be selling in Canada, the UK, Australia and
just about any other English speaking country in the
world providing your fulfillment costs work for your
budget.
If you distribute your products or services over the
Internet, selling outside the USA is a no-brainer
for you. And you should capture more than just the
email address. Why? To develop another revenue
stream.
Your customers are already filling out your form
with their name and email address, so ask them for
their home address and phone number as well.
Now you have the information you need to increase
your revenue by
renting your lists, starting
affiliate programs (including physical products
delivered to your customers doorstep), expanding
your product line (CDs, DVDs, Books, etc.) and more.
Information is king in the Internet marketing world,
so collect all you can even if you don’t think
you’ll use it immediately.
But in order to do that you must have one vital
element.
The key to international sales success
Simply put, the key for you as an international
business is to develop a contact database that is
global-address friendly. This is critical!
Putting contact information for Canada, the UK or
another foreign country into a form developed for
the USA is like putting a square peg in a round
hole. You’ll lose critical information at the very
beginning, and the delivery address and format will
be wrong from the get go. That’s a contact database
disaster that could easily have been avoided.
One common concern US based businesses have about
doing business abroad is that international address
formats sometimes change with little or no apparent
notice. This, of course, results is slow or
undeliverable mail and parcels leading to wasted
postage and an unfavorable ROI. But there are easy
ways to guard against it.
To learn how to format international addresses
correctly, and easily keep up with format changes,
check out the resource area below.
For now, let’s focus on getting you started in
Canada. Here’s the current address information to
help you set up your database.
Canadian Address Format
The Canadian Post Office™ prefers that addresses are
formatted to contain:
• Only upper case (though Canada Post accepts
mixed-case addresses)
• No punctuation (but diacritics should be used for
mixed case addresses)
• Standard abbreviations
The format is:
RECIPIENTS NAME AND/OR TITLE
DEPARTMENT/BUILDING NAME
COMPANY NAME
NUMBER[ ]THOROUGHFARE
SETTLEMENT[ ]PROVINCE CODE[ ]POSTAL CODE
For example:
Mr. J. Smith
14 Greenman Drive Apt. 103
KINGSTON ON K7M 7T5
should be written
MR J SMITH
14 GREENMAN DR APT 103
KINGSTON ON K7M 7T5
Though this is the preferred format for the CPC, the
CPC encourages all mailers to respect the wishes of
customers in matters of format.
The Canadian
Addressing Guide has taken care to accommodate the
requirements of the English and French languages by
recognizing and accepting the use of upper and
lower-case characters, including accents, as well as
the full spelling of and punctuation between
addressing elements.
Unit or apartment number may precede or follow the
street name, preceded by a type indicator such as
APT. A # or the French abbreviation no. should never
be used before the house number. If more space is
required, this information can be moved to a line
above. If the unit number is written before the
house number (called the civic number by Canada
Post) there should be a hyphen between the numbers
is this way: 10-123
If the house number is followed by a letter, there
should be no space between them:
123A
If followed by a fraction, there should be one
space:
123 1/2
If the street name is numeric, there should be a
space between the house number and the street name:
123 22ND AVE
The street name used must be the one recognized by
the municipality and may not be translated.
The postal code is placed on the same address line
as the settlement and province, and is separated
from the province by two spaces. If the total length
of this line is greater than 40, the Canadian Post
Office prefers that the postal code is moved
(left-justified) to the line beneath.
So here’s your game plan: Start marketing your
products in Canada and then roll out to other
countries. Keep it simple for now. Canada is step
one.
Source: Bob Hull is the director of business development at Melissa Data
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