Interview with opinion leaders: How to utilize and benefit from multilingual email marketing

“Making your email marketing multilingual can and will open up opportunities you may have previously overlooked.”

Lindsae Gilbert,

CEO and founder of BuzzBox.

Communicating with clients in their native language is not only a polite gesture but also part of the notorious personalization that everyone is talking about. It helps you to be on the same page with your clients. But what effort does it take a business to go multilingual? Most importantly, is it worth it?

We have discussed this question with CMOs, CEOs, and email marketing professionals from different brands worldwide.

Before we dive in, let us introduce our guests to you:

• Lindsae Gilbert, CEO and founder of BuzzBox. This is a marketing agency that helps brands make the right buzz.

• Cyrill Gross, partner, consultant, and developer at Mayoris, a digital marketing service agency specializing in CRM, marketing automation, and (interactive) email marketing.

• Simon Fischer of Magix, which is an international provider of multimedia software that offers advanced and user-friendly products for editing and publishing videos, music, photos, and websites.

• Maksym Ivanytskyi, product communications specialist at Jooble. This is an international job search website founded by Ukrainians. It helps people in 69 countries find jobs, and employers can find new talented employees.

• Benjamin Smet, marketing and eCommerce professional at Sport Nutrition, which is the largest chain of sports nutrition stores in Belgium.

• Pavel Pola, CEO of Etnetera Activate, a digital agency at the Etnetera Group, the Czech Republic. They help clients improve results by searching their data for treasures, for example, in email marketing.

• Mathias Ditlev, CEO and founder of Onlime, a Scandinavian company. Onlime provides backup and sync solutions to private users and businesses.

• Reina Toeda, email automation team lead at Semrush. Semrush is a world-renowned SEO tool that does your keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy of your competition, runs an SEO audit of your blog, looks for backlinking opportunities, etc.

Benefits of going multilingual

In this section, we will cover the following questions:

1. Why did you decide to run email campaigns in multiple languages?
2. How long have you been running your emails in multiple languages? Has it affected your business somehow (ROI, conversion, engagement, etc.)? 

Why did you/your clients decide to run email campaigns in multiple languages?

Reina Toeda, Semrush

Most of my multilingual experience comes from working in the education industry, where we had to engage because of the nature of the product itself — English language courses! Marketing a language course to non-English speakers in English would give us low engagement and conversion rates, so we started going multilingual as we launched our brand in new markets.

Benjamin Smet, Sport Nutrition

Our headquarters are in Belgium, where Dutch (NL) and French are the national languages. So, we need to run email campaigns in at least these two languages. And we have now decided to enter the EU market.

Simon Fischer, Magix

It helps us to much more efficiently reach niche markets that do not speak English. Also, it helps us match up with the localized landing pages and ads we run.

Cyrill Gross, Mayoris

Being located in Switzerland, we run multilingual email campaigns is our daily business. Switzerland has four official languages — German, French, Italian, and Romansch, the first three of which are usually relevant for communication. In addition, being a popular ex-pat destination, English is often used along with the local languages.

Many customers have a greater appreciation for communication in their native language than the product price or other features. And when it comes to complex or sensitive services, communicating in customers’ preferred languages is crucial.

Thus, sending out campaigns, service emails, and feedback requests in multiple languages is not just a nice thing to have here but, rather, a core requirement.

Mathias Ditlev, Onlime

Our customers mostly speak Danish. But as we want to go global, we added English for starters with the option of expanding further.

Lindsae Gilbert, BuzzBox

Running campaigns in multiple languages is not a “decision” per se; it is an absolute need. I have clients that run businesses in multiple countries, so we usually run campaigns in Mandarin, Spanish, and French, to name a few.

How long have you been running your emails in multiple languages? Has it affected your business somehow (ROI, conversion, engagement, etc.)?

Benjamin Smet, Sport Nutrition

If we run an email campaign in English for the entire database, our OR will be 3–4%. When we run an email campaign in a number of languages, our OR goes as high as 40%. So our OR is several times higher.

Lindsae Gilbert, BuzzBox

I can’t tell you an exact number, but it can and will open opportunities you may have overlooked.

Multilingual email marketing: When to start and how to do it right

In this section, we will cover the following questions:

1. When do you think a company is ready to start multilingual email marketing, and what are the first steps to making it right?
2. When adding a new language to your campaigns, what factors do you need to consider?
3. What is the biggest challenge here?
4. What is the ideal email translation flow, in your opinion, meaning? How would you improve your current flow?
5. How do you maintain consistency, terms-wise, across all emails, and how important is this?

When do you think a company is ready to start multilingual email marketing, and what are the first steps to making it right?

Cyrill Gross, Mayoris

When a company plans to enter a multi-language market such as Switzerland or even Europe as a whole, one important step to making it right is not to self-use translation services. It pays off to go with an experienced translation service that employs local native speakers to fine-tune translations.

Pavel Pola, Etnetera Activate

I believe that when you want local people to think about your brand as “theirs,” you need to communicate with them in their native language.

From my point of view, the most important first step is to hire a local/native speaker who knows and understands the market. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. There are tons of small differences, and you have to handle them appropriately.

Reina Toeda, Semrush

The first step is understanding the resources you need (team, tech stack) and payment gateways (if you are charging in different currencies) and laying out smooth processes for localization, QA, and execution. Start small in one language and then move on to the next one, constantly evaluating and improving your processes.

What things do you need to consider when adding a new language to your campaigns?

Benjamin Smet, Sport Nutrition

Everything is in the “nuance,” and everything requires your attention. You need to pay close attention to the number of characters in translations, i.e., the number of characters in a translation.

A little example: you’ll see in an EN email a button saying: “Discover Now.” You won’t translate that as “Découvrir Maintenant” in FR, as it will be too long. You’ll go with “En Savoir Plus” to keep it shorter and to the point.

Mathias Ditlev, Onlime

First, you need to properly detect the recipient’s language.

Maksym Ivanytskyi, Jooble

You need to check if all the external links and images are localized.

Reina Toeda, Semrush

• find the right team, and streamline the processes. This is key;
• be sure to assess the localization to avoid bad email copies;
• make it easier for the translator to see the copy in situ in order to avoid lots of back and forth as some languages have very long words, such as Thai or German, and could break the email design if not shortened;
• prioritize the most important emails—transactional over marketing—and figure out the best way to build the campaigns without compromising on reporting needs.

Lindsae Gilbert, BuzzBox

Proofreading: Always have a native speaker proofread your email copy to ensure that all dual-meaning words are translated correctly to avoid misunderstandings, especially if you use an online translation tool.

Pavel Pola, Etnetera Activate  

​​It’s not only about the language. There are many different things to consider, such as:

• currency;
• text reading direction (right to left, left to right);
• alphabets;
• dialects, such as those in English and German;
• specific wording issues as some words could have negative connotations;
• local specifics (legal, regulatory, etc.).

Cyrill Gross, Mayoris

You need to keep in mind that the use of the same language can vary between countries and regions.

A good example of this is the emphasized “s” in German:

• in Germany and Austria, they use the Eszett character ß;
• in Switzerland, they don’t.

It also applies to certain words or phrases that can vary in usage and even lead to confusion.

What is the biggest challenge here?

Mathias Ditlev, Onlime

Dealing with currencies and units of measurement, such as kg and lbs. Merge tags are another issue, for example, if they have extra spaces after translation. We had a case when *|CURRENT_YEAR|* became * | CURRENT_YEAR | * (extra spaces appeared between * and | ).

Cyrill Gross, Mayoris

The biggest challenge is when marketing and service languages vary. We have clients who do not send marketing campaigns in all the languages available on their eCommerce platform and simply send their service emails. Thus, we need to manage language settings per user and communication type/channel. This is already a challenge to handle in one system alone. When the MarTech platform is integrated into a larger tech stack with CRM, ERP, CDP, etc., it quickly becomes very complex.

The general advice is to keep it as simple as possible.

Pavel Pola, Etnetera Activate

One of the biggest challenges that we often forget about are local Internet service providers (ISPs). For example, the biggest ISP in the Czech Republic is Seznam.cz, whose share of B2C inboxes exceeds 60%. They have their own rules for successful delivery, so if you neglect them, your emails will not be delivered to the recipient’s inboxes. Almost every country (esp. in Europe) has a different major local provider, so you have to consider all of them.

ESPs either don’t bother or cannot cover this problem—even the big names—so you cannot rely on them; you need to take care of this on your own.

Maksym Ivanytskyi, Jooble

Speed of implementation: We use from 60 to 100 emails for communication with employers/employees from different countries.

When you need to add a new language, this will take you a while unless you find a way to optimize the process.

Reina Toeda, Semrush

Building in a smart, scalable way while getting the granular reporting you need to analyze and optimize campaigns.

What is the ideal email translation flow, in your opinion, meaning? How would you improve your current flow?

Cyrill Gross, Mayoris

In my opinion, it is as follows:

The earlier the translation is performed, the more we need to rework during the reviewing loops. Imagine a campaign that includes a complex landing page (such as a price draw with a wheel of fortune as a gamification element) and multiple emails for promotion and transactional purposes. If the whole translation is done before the first line of code has been written, and the whole package, including all languages, is created as one batch, late corrections and improvements (which are more common than exceptional) will require additional translations, coding, and testing work in all our language variants.

On the contrary, if we build one language first, implement all corrections and improvements, and get all required approvals, we need to do the translation and implementation work once. This saves a great deal of time and money.

Pavel Pola, Etnetera Activate

It all depends on where the content is created. If you have nearly identical email campaigns across many countries, then the email translation process definitely must be “semi-automated” to reduce the costs. Imagine a graphic designer adding “Buy now” to the button, then sending it in a PSD format to a French translator, and receiving the response “Achetez dès maintenant.” But this length would break the button into two rows. So the graphic designer has to send the screenshot back saying, “it’s too long; could you shorten it?” They are pinging it back and forth many times, which is not OK.

So, we need a system that would allow them to work on emails simultaneously so that the translator could see their translations in real-time in the final template.

The other challenge here would be how easy it is to add a different copy or even modify the design for another language version of the email. We all remember that we need to localize images as well, right? For example, some email marketing tools would require tons of mouse clicks and drag-and-drops to create a new language version of your email campaign.

In other words, reducing time and financial costs are the biggest challenges here that we need to learn to take care of.

Reina Toeda, Semrush

We have in-house marketing managers who translate our English content into their local languages, and I think that we could improve our campaign if we involved them more in the strategy and not just in translation. Basically, have a global strategy, but localize it with the regional experts to make sure it’s adjusted for each culture and market.

Question 7. How do you maintain consistency, terms-wise, across all emails, and how important is this?

Reina Toeda, Semrush

Having and keeping to style guidelines and a design system can help maintain consistency in tone across all emails.

Simon Fischer, Magix

We understand that it is crucial for text and visuals in emails to be aligned with each other, so we have prepared our brand book/brand guidelines and share them with translators when necessary.

Conclusions

As our guests stated, running email marketing in several languages is no longer an option but an absolute must as it is a component of personalization.

• some translate emails in several languages as there are 2–4 official languages in their countries, so they have to;
• some enter new markets and go global;
• some increase ROI by reaching out to new clients;
• some, for example, Stripo, have optimized their website to a number of languages, so they need to keep email marketing aligned with their website and communicate with clients in their native languages.

Even though multilingual email marketing is currently both a trend and a must, it remains challenging as there are currently no strict guidelines and recommendations on how to translate emails in the right way, how to detect customers’ language preferences, etc.

The fact that the services that run multilingual email marketing do not have a single approach is proof of that.

So, what do we have here? There is a need to translate emails, yet there is a lack of information on this subject.

This is why we decided to investigate this topic in greater depth.

Stay tuned for more, and make sure to share your email translation experience in the comments below.