How to Use Localization to Boost Email Marketing Campaigns
Last update: 5 January 2024 at 02:07 pm
3.00/5Contrary to widespread belief, email marketing localization is an absolute necessity for brands targeting multinational audiences, not an add-on task. Localizing your offerings opens doors of opportunity in terms of connecting and building rapport with your target audience and is a great way to expand your reach and reduce your competition.
This post looks at the basics of email marketing localization and how localization can boost your marketing campaigns!
The Critical Importance of Marketing Localization
Although e-commerce is a multibillion-dollar industry, and consumers are more than willing to purchase from foreign brands online, there’s a catch! Your global audience members all want the ability to consume video content, be addressed in, and review products in their own language, and purchase those products in their own currency.
According to W3 data, there are roughly 7,000 living languages in the world, yet despite this fact, the content on the internet comprises a mere 11 languages. The data also reveals that some 85 languages are spoken by more than 10 million people, and 23 other languages are spoken by more than 50 million people. This means a gap in the market leaves speakers of almost 100 languages without the means to consume content in their native language.
The math is simple. With a professional, localized email marketing campaign, you can target millions of consumers by offering them content in their native language and simultaneously competing with less than 1% of the internet’s content.
How to Define Your Localized Marketing Strategy
A localized marketing strategy prepares your brand to enter and take the stage in the international market. Your marketing strategy also outlines how your brand will compete with similar brands internationally.
In order to come up with an achievable global marketing strategy, you’ll need to consider the following factors:
Your Value Proposition
What is it that makes your brand stand out? Why should your target audience care about your brand and offering and choose your product over your competitors?
Your Target Audience
Which type of consumers are you targeting with your marketing efforts? What does your ideal target customer segment look like? How will you propose yourself as a unique brand among this target demographic?
Opportunities for Success
Why would your target audience connect with your brand? Is there a specific event that took place that might make them more likely to identify with your brand? Is there any specific reason your ideal customers would choose your brand over your competitor?
Your Business Model
How will you go about building your brand in each new market? Is there an optimal way to drive revenue in every market whilst adhering to local regulations and the different financial conditions of your target audiences?
Your Products and Services
What primary offerings are you introducing into each new market? How can your marketing teams adapt these offerings to suit the local needs of your customers?
Marketing Mix
What are the best opportunities for your marketing teams to reach new customers? How will you best communicate with the new market segment and close sales? Do you have specific campaigns planned for each new region, and what will the costs be? Which marketing materials will you use in your localized marketing strategy?
Your Resources
What kind of financial and human investments will be required to execute your international marketing strategy successfully? Is there a specific organizational structure or technologies you need to implement to strengthen your brand’s position?
Local Nuances
Are there any political, economic, or cultural factors in the new regions that can affect the ROI of your international marketing campaigns and your brand’s success? In which ways can you adapt your strategy on a local level for each of the foreign markets you’re targeting?
Why Every Brand Must Localize Their Email Marketing Campaign
Your audience’s native language and demographic location are two of the most important factors to keep in mind when it comes to localized marketing. To maximize the ROI potential of your global marketing campaigns, you must understand that your localized marketing campaigns directed at consumers in more rural areas will differ from your offerings for your audiences in urban areas. This differentiating factor is why localization is such an essential element of email marketing.
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Discover the most relevant agencies for your project based on your own specific requirements.
Find an agency!Localization is a highly specialized project that’s best left to professional translation agencies who are intimately familiar with the linguistic and cultural references relevant to building a strong relationship with the new target audience. With professional localization, globalization, and internationalization services, you can scale your business by addressing your audience in a language they understand. With more than 280 million emails sent every day, brands have no choice but to localize their offerings that target individual segments of their global audiences and show that they understand their audience’s culture, traditions, buying habits, language, and cultural nuances.
Factors that can influence the consumers’ behaviour
Several factors influence the behaviour of consumers from one demographical area to another. These include:
Communication style – While an American target market might prefer a more casual communication style, Germans, for example, have a much more formal conversational tone.
Data security – While a user in one part of the world might have no issues with sharing their personal data, others might be much more sensitive to this.
Color impressions – Did you know that 90% of snap decisions surrounding product purchases are based on color? According to the ‘Impact of Color in Marketing’ study, it’s essential to choose the perfect colors when branding your localized marketing campaigns as it can trigger cultural and religious nuances in your target market. Red, for instance, is a color considered auspicious in China, but it represents masculinity in France, negativity in Germany, and love in the USA.
Cultural differences – This is an aspect that can make or break your localized marketing campaigns. Although some of your customers from different regions might all speak English, Canadians don’t speak the same English dialect as Brits, and there’s a vast difference in the terms you should be using to capture the attention of each of these demographic groups.
What Elements Should You be Localizing in Your Marketing Emails?
If you’re launching an international email marketing campaign, it’s essential to focus on the following elements and localize them for unique groups within your target market:
#1 – Subject
You probably already know that the ideal length for a subject line is 50 characters or less if you’re pitching in English. But if you’re localizing for a German or French audience, this can stretch up to 70 characters. You can also apply this to preheaders, but the general rule of thumb is to keep things short, concise, and to the point.
#2 – Script and CTA Design
Many Middle Eastern languages are written from right to left, unlike English and European languages, which are written from left to right. This is an important consideration to keep in mind with localized marketing campaigns.
The same rings true for your CTA. Even the simplest three-letter CTA can look messy once translated and incorporated into fixed-width elements. Your CTA needs to comprise widely accepted words within your target market that fit into the email’s aesthetics.
#3 – Local Regulations of Your Target Audience
There are various regional laws in place that govern electronic messaging, and along with permission policies and anti-spam services, this can influence your marketing campaign’s ROI. Some common regulations worth getting familiar with include:
#4 – Visual Elements
It’s always best to use neutral images within your emails to avoid generating negative responses from certain audiences. Using neutral images can also make it easier to reuse visual elements for multiple locations.
#5 – Human Touch
The whole aim of localization is to help build rapport with your target audience in a language they understand and within a cultural context that they are familiar with. Your brand messaging thus needs to appeal to your customers in a human way, which means your marketing tone, humor, and wit needs to stay intact when you translate your message into various languages.
#6 – Signature
The words you use to close off your email might be as important as the content of the email. While we consider “Regards” as a standard email signature in the USA, a British audience much rather prefers a “Kind Regards” at the end of their emails. It’s essential to research your audience’s culture to ensure you’re using the correct sign-off and not leaving them flustered by the endings of your emails.
#7 – Video Content
Many consumers prefer consuming video content over written content, but then again, not every video can translate well to the public. This is why you can localize your videos for more than one language. Although subtitles are a great tool to make your videos more accessible to a larger audience, subtitling software hard-codes the subtitles into the video and makes them permanent, unable to be used for multiple languages. Adding closed captioning to your videos is a much better alternative as the .srt files are indexed by search engines (hello SEO) and don’t limit you on how many languages and local markets you can localize for.
How Social Media Marketing and Website Localization Can Boost Email Lead Generation and Sales
It’s very challenging to launch and run a successful email marketing campaign without list building. Consumers share images and videos on social media platforms, which makes them excellent resources for a list-building project that includes audience members from across the globe. Although the languages used on social media platforms do vary, the variety is big enough to help you structure a global list-building campaign to stand out from the competition.
You can also reuse older materials from previous email marketing campaigns on social media platforms since it can help you expand your audience without the need to recreate marketing materials for social media marketing constantly.
And although it might initially make sense to localize just the most relevant pages of your website when you start targeting an international audience, this will not always be sufficient. It might eventually make more sense to translate and localize your entire website to ensure international audiences feel catered to whenever they visit your website.
Wrapping Up Localized Email Marketing Efforts
Successfully localizing your email marketing campaigns can provide brands with the tools they need to expand their reach more rapidly and improve the ROI of their marketing efforts. Email marketing forms part of the customer experience, and a localized customer experience can improve customer retention among your target audience and drive sales.
When localizing your email marketing projects, it’s essential to pay close attention to the commercial, cultural, and regional preferences of your international target audience. After all, the ultimate aim of localization is gaining the trust of your audience, so they’re more willing to engage with your brand, purchase your products, and become loyal brand supporters.
FAQs
Email localization refers to the process of adapting and customizing email content to suit the linguistic, cultural, and regional preferences of a specific target audience. It involves tailoring emails to resonate with the unique characteristics of different regions, ensuring that the communication is relevant, engaging, and culturally sensitive.
Localization in marketing is the practice of tailoring marketing strategies, content, and messages to suit the specific needs and preferences of a local audience. This includes adjusting language, imagery, and cultural references to ensure that marketing efforts effectively resonate with the target demographic in a particular region.
In the context of email marketing, a locale refers to a specific geographic or cultural region. It includes elements such as language, currency, date formats, and cultural references that are unique to that particular region. Understanding and utilizing the locale in your email marketing efforts ensures that your messages are well-received and resonate with the local audience, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
