Case Study

Academica Group: Moving to a Canadian Platform Built for Daily Sends

At a Glance

Industry: Post-Secondary Education, Research and Consulting Services
Newsletter size: 30,000–35,000 subscribers
Send frequency: Daily + bi-weekly newsletters, seasonal marketing campaigns, surveys and consultation invitations
Sub-accounts: 3 active
Primary contact: Rachel Janzen, Communications & Marketing Manager at Academica Group

The Challenge

As a market research and consulting firm working with the Canadian post-secondary education sector, Academica Group needs secure, responsive, and reliable ways to reach people across Canada. Between conducting surveys on behalf of post-secondary institutions across Canada and sending regular newsletters to a list of 30,000+ contacts across the sector, reliability and responsiveness are non-negotiable. Over the last decade, Canadian data residency has become a particularly crucial consideration for many in the post-secondary sector.

Data residency: With most email sending products processing data outside of Canada, Academica was keen to identify opportunities within the country to ensure alignment with client expectations.
Unresponsive support: With varied use cases and a daily publication schedule, Academica needed customer support that was quick, responsive, and easy to access.
Product clutter: Other platforms were bloated with features they never used, while core email functionality had recurring issues.

"With other platforms, we kept seeing a drift away from quality to quantity with services. It was frustrating to encounter issues where a service’s main functionality isn't working, but their team is announcing new products that were irrelevant to us."

Rachel Janzen
Marketing & Communications Manager
Academica Group

The Solution

Driven by shifting privacy expectations and challenges with other sending platforms, Rachel began to search specifically for Canadian email platforms that could handle high-volume newsletter sends. Envoke cleared her key requirements: Canadian data storage, reliable core functionality, and a support team she could actually reach.

The team adopted Envoke for their newsletters, marketing efforts, and select research-related sends.

Canadian data storage, meeting privacy expectations of post-secondary clients
Sub-accounts to keep newsletter operations, research panels, and custom client sends cleanly separated
Focused product built around email, without the noise of unused marketing features
A support team available when issues come up, including on tight daily turnarounds

The Results

Reliable Daily Delivery
Academica sends a daily newsletter to tens of thousands of contacts in the post-secondary sector. Envoke’s stable platform and accessible support team means Rachel can troubleshoot quickly when she needs to, rather than waiting for a response that may not arrive before the send window closes.

Privacy Confidence for Research Clients
Working with universities and colleges means data handling is always in scope. With Envoke, Academica can point to Canadian data residency as a clear feature of their stack and can pivot to meet the needs of clients working under tight privacy policies and expectations. That matters both internally and in conversations with privacy-conscious institutional clients.

A Cleaner, More Focused Tool
After working for years with multiple systems that were interested in expanding—rather than improving—their systems, Rachel found the contrast with Envoke notable. The platform does what it’s built to do without the distraction of tools aimed at a different kind of user.

"Envoke knows what court it plays on and focuses on that. We are more interested in working with a company that knows its focus than paying for a wide spread of ‘okay’ services."

Rachel Janzen
Marketing & Communications Manager
Academica Group

Organized Multi-Use Operations
Academica draws on Envoke’s sub-account and subscription management functionality to cleanly separate their newsletter and communications sends, their internal research panel, and their custom client research sends.

For Canadian research and consulting firms with high-frequency sends, a focused platform with domestic data storage and reachable support can replace a lot of features you were paying for but never using.

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