Performing a multilingual email marketing campaign is an effective solution for reaching a wider audience and improving your sales.
The U.S. is depicted as a “melting pot”, in which many ethnicities come together to form the cultural diversity of the country. To make your products/services stand out in the market and captivate different groups of consumers in the U.S., you need to deliver your content in their native language, as 50%- 85% of consumers will not give the time of day to a product that is not advertised in their native tongue.
Read on to know what you should bear in mind to create a successful multilingual email marketing campaign in the U.S.
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#1 – Segmentation & Targeting are of great importance
Correct segmentation is always necessary, and even more when it comes to multilingual campaigns. Proper segmentation helps you deliver more relevant email marketing to the right subscribers.
There are a variety of ways to segment your audience by language. For example, let’s say you have a landing page with a signup form, and you would like to gain subscribers from those who speak English, Spanish and Chinese in the U.S. As such, the landing page should be available in these 3 languages.
You may use conditional content, showing different text on each section of the landing page, depending on your user’s browser data, interests, purchase history, and much more. Consider including a “Language” field as an option in your signup form. To learn more about how to build conditional content, you can read the relevant documentation from your email marketing automation/landing page creation tool.
MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and many other major email automation solutions allow you to design multilingual email marketing campaigns through conditional content.
After you have created a well-segmented list, it’s time to generate content specifically for the targeted groups of people.
In addition to language segmentation, you should also account for targeting the right audience. For example, if you are selling gardening products or savvy kitchen appliances, then there is a small percentage of students that will be interested in your products.
You want to reach out to folks who will actually take notice of what you are offering. High-quality subscribers will lead to improved conversion rates. Consider how you might locate more of them, such as joining forums/Facebook groups where your target audiences are actively reading and engaging with posts, then sharing helpful knowledge that is relevant to your business. Give for no condition first and you will gain their trust back. If done properly, they will actively register your content through your multilingual email marketing campaign.
#2 – Outstanding Subject Line can make your multilingual email marketing campaign different
On 500’s blog, Susan Su states that every person receives 500 marketing emails per month on average. And no one is going to spend hours of their time opening every single one.
Convince & Convert further says that 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. In other words, they are the decider of whether the subscriber is going to open the email.
You have to make subscribers think it’s not just another marketing email, which may start with an outstanding subject line. You could consider including your subject line with ‘inviting’ phrases like ‘free gift’, ‘20% off’ or ‘you don’t want to miss this’.
#3 – Localized Content is a must for a successful multilingual email marketing campaign
It’s impossible to run multilingual email marketing campaigns in isolation.
Let’s continue with the example from the previous section. Our multilingual landing page will perform much better if it is a part of a multilingual website, and emails to potential customers will make a big difference if they include or link to information in Spanish and Chinese. Even if you offer the same content and discounts in many languages, language translation alone may not be sufficient to engage foreign customers.
Localization is more than just translating words; it also includes formatting, tone, and graphics to ensure that your brand is as appealing to foreign prospects as it is to your original target audience.
If the translation is neutral and sometimes indifferent to culture, localization is strongly entwined with it. A localization specialist will have the adequate cross-cultural understanding to replicate the meaning and effect of the original words to your target language.
Here are examples of customized emails for Spanish and Chinese customers.
#4 – Results & Actionable Information need to be carefully evaluated
While an obsession with data can potentially hinder your creative instincts, measuring results to orient your next move and refine your campaign is crucial.
When working with multilingual campaigns, your key metrics stay the same as working with monolingual campaigns, which include open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, list growth rate, when and how many people unsubscribe, etc.
The difference here is that you should not only evaluate them over time and with themselves, but also with your other campaigns.
- What type of subject line gets the highest open rate?
- Are they more likely to click a link that is personalized?
- What catches their eye the most?
However, understanding what to do next in multilingual campaigns may need cross-cultural expertise that you have not acquired already or can not find in-house.
Work with GTE Localize for your Multilingual Email Marketing Campaign
If you are looking for a reliable companion that is not specialized in translation but also localization for a variety of languages as in the U.S. market, look no further than GTE Localize.
GTE Localize offers professional multilingual email marketing campaigns for various sectors such as IT, Finance, Health, Safety, Legal, Pharma, and Manufacturing in more than 150 languages. We have a wide pool of talented native linguists to help you improve your multilingual communications. As a certified ISO 9001:2015 translation company and a member of the Globalization and Localization Association, we are dedicated to delivering error-free translations that are adjusted appropriately to fit well with your target audience.
Contact our localization specialists right now to kick off your multilingual email marketing campaign, or to get a 300-word-long test for free!
