Email Marketing in 8 different languages

Are you looking to email the same communication in 8 languages or do you have 8 teams doing independent marketing in language (i.e. they are creating everything in language)?

Hi Allison,

What is the use-case? Is this a one-off email that needs to be dynamic or will you have this request often? Also, will other assets need to be in different languages too (landing pages, forms, etc.)?

Kim

Hi Allison,

We currently do up to, I think, five languages within one campaign across email and landing pages.  I'd recommend using tokens for almost all, if not all, of the email content.  The email looks essentially blank in the editor.  This makes creation and editing much easier, less error prone and quicker.  We also always wrap up the English language version first, than get the content translated, to avoid having to make changes to the other languages later, which adds significant time and cost if you have to end up doing it.  Also consider the timing of your campaigns to go to each language/time zone at the right time.  This makes a big difference in open rates.

If you do extend this to landing pages make sure to translate the forms, thank you pages, etc.  This all adds up to higher conversion rates for us.  And I'd definitely encourage you to take the time to use more languages when possible.  Our conversion rates have gone up as much as 30% when we communicate in the local language.

Lauren

To add on to everyone else's comments.  You want to use segments to delineate who get's what language and use dynamic content in the email.  So you will have one email in marketo, and within that email depending on the segment, it will show the different languages.  That way it is much easier to manage. 

Hi Allison,

We also utilize Smartling for translating the content.  It automatically syncs into Marketo once the translation is complete.

Best,

Brittney

Lots of great suggestions in the replies here.  Like most things in Marketo, there are a lot of potential avenues to accomplish this.  I love segmentation (suggested above) particularly for things like auto-reply or trigger emails, but for one-off batch emails I occasionally prefer just creating a separate email asset for each language.  This way I can specify at the Smart Campaign level, rather than at the Segment level exactly who should be receiving which email (which has come in handy when my subscription's segmentations don't quite align with the intended breakdown for the send).  I also find triggering the correct follow-up campaign and analyzing the email analytics a bit cleaner this way -- the tradeoff is that you do have a bit more overhead in your program.

If you have local users in Marketo doing things like edits/approvals, this can also take away any potential ambiguity around exactly where they should be making their edits -- dynamic content may not be super familiar to them depending on their level of comfort with Marketo.

At a strategic level, I find this works best when you are able to have someone internally who can review each of the localized versions -- they're going to be much more familiar with the terminology your business likely uses than any localization service provider would be.