Email is a proven and powerful medium for connecting with your customers, but only 26% of internet users are native English speakers. This means there is an opportunity to translate your marketing communications into other languages.
However, implementing email localization can be challenging. So in this webinar, we cover:
- Common challenges of email localization
- Benefits of localizing your emails
- Essentials for an effective email localization campaign
The Challenges of Email Localization
We have seen that there are three most common challenges when trying to deliver emails to global customers.
1. Localization support in most email platforms is an afterthought.
Many email platforms out there usually require you to manage each locale as a separate email, or you need a developer to build one email with a lot of templating code. This approach is okay if you support just a few languages, but it is very difficult to scale.
Modern HTML makes this a little easier, but often, email HTML is without an automated solution, resulting in your team spending a lot of time doing things manually.
2. There are learning curves to mastering email localization.
Localizing email is more than just translating text. There are many small details you need to pay attention to, such as:
- Verifying links to send customers to the localized landing pages
- Showing appropriate images based on someone's country/region
- Building correct footers with different legalese to stay compliant
- Specifying language code in the HTML, so screenreaders read the email in the correct accent
- Orienting text and layout correctly for right-to-left languages (i.e., Hebrew and Arabic)
3. Quality assurance is often overlooked.
After localizing your emails, you need to test that all your email templates render correctly. This could mean double-checking that dynamic fields populate properly or the layout looks good across locales (i.e., a short sentence in English might become three very long words in German and break the design). Every language you support is going to require a QA session.
Check out this article on ways to address common email localization challenges.
How Email Localization Drives ROI
Check out these stats:
- 65% of consumers prefer content in their native language, even if it’s poor quality.
- 40% said they would never make a purchase online if it’s not in their native language
- It’s expected that 4.3 billion people will be using email by 2023.
- Only 26% of marketers are prioritizing localized content.
This opens the gates to exploring a big pool of audiences and customers. Email continues to deliver a strong return on investment at $48 for every $1 spent, and this tells us that now more than ever before, brands need to have a robust strategy in place for scaling and growing their email channel.
Understand who your target audience is, where they are, and what languages they speak before translating your content to personalize your communication with customers from all around the world!
Learn more about what it takes to implement an effective, scalable email localization strategy while reducing costs and improving time to market:
Download the whitepaper “Localizing Your Email Templates at Scale.”
A Few Essentials for an Effective Email Localization Campaign
Email Localization Software
Without email localization software, every new locale is a duplication of effort. The advantage of Dyspatch’s email localization workflow and Smartling’s TMS and professional services is more efficiency.
With the Dyspatch platform, you can localize the content of the emails based on the editable text within your Dyspatch email templates. This eliminates having to manage content through complicated workarounds such as multiple Excel sheets, HTML files, etc. Templates are centralized, and you can easily export and update them.
An efficient translation process means more time to personalize your emails and dive even deeper into your strategy!
Text and Images
Are you still making 20 different creatives for each of your locales? Or could you benefit from being able to translate the copy directly on the image? If you're sending emails with images overlaid on text as a JPG, it would be time-consuming to manually translate and replace the image every time.
With Dyspatch, you can create HTML banner images with rendered text so that it's much easier to translate – no need for multiple images. That being said, the Dyspatch platform also supports image localization, changing the embedded image based on locale.
