Webinar: Localizing Your Email Templates at Scale

Webinar Summary

Dyspatch recently teamed up with Smartling’s Head of Marketing, Adrian Cohn, to dig into the challenges of email localization and how to solve them. Read on for a summary of the key points covered, including:

• The challenges of scaling your email localizations
• How to implement a streamlined email localization workflow
• The advantages of AI-powered translations
• How a Fortune 500 company improved their time to market by 250%

Meet the Speakers

Vero Best, VP Product at Dyspatch

As a career product person, Vero has worked for many companies from online dating platform, Plenty of Fish, to Soundcloud, a global music streaming service. Throughout her career, she’s localized emails for countries around the globe, which gives her great insight into the complexities of the process. Part of what attracted her to Dyspatch was the fact it provides a solution for localizing email templates at scale. (A challenge she’s very familiar with!)

Adrian Cohn, Head of Marketing at Smartling

Adrian has been with Smartling, a language translation company, for over six years. Prior to running the marketing team, Adrian worked on the customer success team — a role that gave him a deep understanding of the challenges companies face when translating and localizing their content. He’s seen firsthand how customers translate their emails. And today, he oversees Smartling’s own email marketing campaigns and localizations.

 

Dyspatch: Vero Best

The Problem

Let’s start by diving into the problem with email and localization in general. To put it succinctly, the problem is:

• More emails. In order to scale your business, you need to scale your email channel.
• More languages. As you expand globally, you need to serve emails in more languages, which compounds the challenges.
• Getting started. Just getting started can be a hurdle. If you’ve never done localizations before, figuring out how to expand to a new market and do it well is no small feat.

These are some of the problems we’ll be unpacking, and we’ll share solutions for how to solve them as a team.

The Challenges of Scaling

Most of us know creating a seamless experience with localization is key to building trust with customers. That part speaks for itself. We’ve all been customers too, and customers really notice when you cut corners.

For example, when someone puts miles instead of kilometers in an email to a Canadian. This happens a lot in hotel listings (distances from certain attractions). One of the things you can do when building an email localizations strategy at scale is to consider these little details. That’s a great way to build trust.

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

Three Major Challenges With Localization

Now, we’ll take a look at the problem of localizations and scalability more broadly. Generally, there are three core challenges our customers experience:

1. Enterprise complexity

The way businesses interact with the world today is done across many touchpoints. It used to be that content creators made magazines and mailed them to subscribers. And maybe, early in the internet days, you had a basic website. But today, the consumer experience is enormously rich.

For example, I just ordered a salad on a mobile app. Every single word on the mobile app was a part of the engagement experience. I received multiple emails letting me know: they received the order; the food was being made; and the food was ready to be picked up. There are so many different distribution channels now. To fully engage and immerse your user, you have to support all of these different channels.

It’s hard to do that in one language. When you start to add multiple languages to the mix, it introduces a level of complexity and scalability that has to be addressed with software. The way translation has been managed for eons is through spreadsheets and ‘copy paste’ manual workflows. But today, you really need an automated solution to simplify the workflow.

2. Insufficient quality controls

Now, I’m not just talking about words being translated correctly. That’s a given. But there’s no way to programmatically manage quality. The way language service providers have worked in the past has been quite challenging for buyers because you don’t actually know who is translating the content. And there's no way to programmatically ensure translation quality. (More on this in a moment.)

3. Data control

Lastly, with so much content, codified here as ‘data’, there’s no way to understand at scale the effect inputs are having on outputs. There’s no real way to tell if a translator is doing well or poorly. There’s no real way to tell if a translation editor is doing their job or just pushing content through. And there’s no way to fully understand where your investment is creating a return.

These are just some of the key challenges we see with localization and they’re absolutely applicable to customers translating emails.

Dyspatch: Vero Best

Common Approaches to Localization

Now, we’ll switch over to a few common approaches. I’ve seen these in places where I’ve worked, and also heard about them from our customers here at Dyspatch. These approaches fall into three main categories:

1. Spreadsheets

The first approach is the spreadsheet option. This involves storing all your translations, every string, in a massive spreadsheet that quickly gets a bit squirrely. People are overwriting each other's work. You don’t know what the latest copy is. It’s hard to manage, but it does work. Especially, when you’re starting out.

2. Templates

The second option is to use templates and duplicate them. This involves creating one template, and then creating a Spanish version, a French version, a German version, etc. You can see how this multiplies quickly. It also makes it hard to find what you’re looking for. Tracking can be a challenge too. And it means you have to pay every time you retranslate the template — even if you’ve only made one copy change, which gets really expensive.

3. Agencies

The agency option can be costly and has a slower turnaround time. So if you’re trying to get templates to market quickly, this can be a challenge. A lot of agencies don’t have the technology to help things go smoothly. They don’t use software. They do the manual option, but they do it for you. So they check everything, quality is high, but it can take a long time. I’ll let Adrian tell you about one of the secret ingredients at Smartling that makes them better than the traditional agency option…

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

Smartling’s Approach

Smartling has both software and language services. That means, you have a single solution for all of your content. The benefit to this combination is the unparalleled visibility into the process, the software automation, and the sheer ease of use.

You also have the ability to overlook many of the fees traditionally involved with localization. Because we have software, we can cut out some of the ‘people’ time and project management time. So our team will take care of everything you need for localization — but without many of the time delays traditionally accepted in the industry.

Dyspatch: Vero Best

Common Issues

Let’s backtrack for a moment to the common approaches we covered, and some the issues that come up with these approaches:

• Consistent voice. It’s hard to ensure your translations follow your brand style guide for tone and voice.

• Clear terminology. And that they use the right terminology. What’s the name of a feature? What’s the name of a product? How do you describe your product in various languages? Are you doing that consistently?

• Branding and design. Branding itself is a challenge. If the translations team doesn’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, or who your brand is, they can’t communicate that for you. This causes a disconnect. In terms of design, how do you make sure the copy on a button in German, English, and French all fits? Or how do you take into consideration right to left (RTL) and left to right (LTR) scripts?

• Cultural nuance. This refers to being mindful of minor cultural nuances. Is it Celsius or Fahrenheit? What about British English vs. American English? These are things folks definitely notice, and you want to be mindful of.

• Stakeholder alignment. A lot of teams are doing approvals in email, Slack, or a combination of the two. That means long email chains. And questions like, did the right person sign off on this? Did we get legal to review the footer? Did design sign off on the change of colour? And herding cats to get that done usually falls on one person. They have to chase people across the organization, when they’re not all on the same team.
• Budget. Finally, budget is a huge consideration. If you have the budget to do all of the above, you’re golden. But paying for high quality translations is key as well. And that will pay off in ROI. But not everybody has access to this right away.

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

How Does Smartling Think About Some of These Issues?

Each of these issues can cause setbacks and add cost. So we believe they have to be handled in chorus. The way you can do that is by centralizing, to a single platform. And that’s why we’ve built the translation management system that we have on offer — to enable our customers to configure all of their preferences before translation even starts.

Everything from your brand terminology — whether it’s a specific phrase or industry language — can be defined up front through glossaries, style guides, and workflow management. Once you have these preprogrammed constructs in the platform, everything can happen automatically.

And it’s very simple to project manage the solution. You can even enable communication between the translator and the content creator. That way, there’s always transparency between parties and the ability to communicate and collaborate on work.

Dyspatch: Vero Best

Priorities to Address to Succeed

As you can see, there are solutions to these challenges, and some of them are very accessible. Ensuring we provide each user with that perfect translation — a culturally contextual, accurate, and empathetic translation — is a big part of getting localization right.

The way to start is to have a plan. I call it a roadmap because I’m a product person! But to get you to your goals, here’s what you need to prioritize:

• Accuracy. Focus on accurate content and translations. Make sure they’re tested before you send them out. We’ll talk more about this in a little bit because it’s something Dyspatch helps with a lot.
• Scalability. For scalability, the key is being able to refer back to previous resources and work. That way, you can easily reuse translations instead of doing them over again.
• Internationalization. Instead of just translation. For example, does the hero image in your template need to change, so it’s showing the Statue of Liberty and not the Eiffel Tower.
• Timelines. You need to keep velocity top of mind and establish predictable timelines. Timelines are important because they tie in so closely to budget. So how do you keep your speed and timelines in check, even as you scale localizations? That is, without compromising on speed or quality?

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

How do you feel about localizing your emails?

We want to know, where are you on your localization journey? Specifically, have you started localizing your emails? And if so, how’s the process going?

Here are the results from the poll:

• Please help! 11%
• It’s okay but could be better. 50%
• We’ve got a good thing goin’. 7%
• We do not localize our emails at this time. 32%

Dyspatch: Vero Best

The Dyspatch Solution

Let’s pivot and start talking about the solution, and how Dyspatch and Smartling can help. Broadly speaking, we're going to cover two big solutions:

1. How to optimize convoluted workflows that are error-prone and slow you down.
2. How to reduce the possibility of botched templates.

We propose you streamline all your localizations and templates in one place. And Dyspatch is the one place where you’ll do all your work related to email creation. So in Dyspatch, you’ll have:

• One source of truth. All your templates will be built in Dyspatch with reusable content blocks. So you don’t have to re-translate a content block. Once you’ve had it translated, you can use it in multiple templates that have been approved and tested.
• Collaboration. You can collaborate with all your stakeholders directly in Dyspatch. You have the option to leave a comment directly on a template itself, instead of having to send an email or check in Slack. No need to resend the brief or chase stakeholders. You can make sure the right person sees a comment in Dyspatch. And once a template is ready, you can assign it to the right person for approval. So it’s easy to make sure your legal rep looks at the legal footer and signs off on it. Plus, once it’s been approved you can reuse it forever.
• Template locking. You have the option to lock a template for translation. What that means is, once the base version of a template is ready, you can lock it so nobody can make changes anymore. So you can send this really great version for translation, either manually or via our API. (More on this in a second.) And nothing gets changed after that point. Templates and translations always stay in sync.

Streamlined Workflows

The other way Dyspatch streamlines your email localization workflow is with POT and PO files. Before you send out your template, you can bring all your translations into Dyspatch. This ties in with the ‘one source of truth’ point above.

Here’s how it works:

• You export all the strings from a template for translation as a POT file. You can include things beyond copy. For example, earlier we mentioned customizing the hero image so it’s more contextual to the folks you’re sending too. You can do a lot of this in Dyspatch since POT files include image links, image descriptions, URLs.
• For translation, you send the POT file to Smartling or your translation team. Some of our customers also use our API for this step, so translation is automatic once the content is ready.
• In return, you receive a PO file for every language you need to support. Then, all you need to do is upload these PO files to Dyspatch in bulk. And that’s it. One click no matter how many locales you have.

We have customers using this solution for 50, 60, 120 locales. And they have one or two people managing this in Dyspatch, not a whole team of people managing translations. The rest of the team can go back to doing other high ROI work.

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

The Smartling Solution

I’ll dig into the translation step a little more here. The good news is, you export the POT and PO files. There's no copying and pasting content into a document or spreadsheet. You simply export the file.

Now, there are two ways to get content in and out of Smartling. With Dyspatch, the first way is via their API. And that's super easy to configure. The other way is you just drag and drop the files into Smartling, like you would drag and drop a file into an email or into Dropbox.

The way Smartling works is we do everything we can to automate the translation flow between your content platforms and our translation management system and translators. As I mentioned, we can do that with an API or pre-built integrations. We have dozens of pre-built integrations with popular CMS’s and design tools, like Figma and Sketch. Then, we have the translation web proxy, which is basically a translation infrastructure for any ‘www’ dot property.

The translation management system (TMS) is an incredible tool where you, as the customer, would go to configure all your preferences. The dashboard allows you to see real-time information about your source content and your translations. Your linguistic assets management tool allows you to upload your glossary and style guide, so specific brand terms are translated the right way and the tone of your content and branding are properly captured by translators.

There's also a workflow configurator, so you can instruct Smartling as to how many human translators or machine translation engines you want to be part of the process. And as the translators work they use a system or service called the ‘cat tool’. This allows them to have visual context for translating content. So you could attach screenshots of your emails into Smartling, and your translator can actually see what their copy will look like in context — on a mobile device or web browser.

Of course, it's a highly secure framework. And we have comprehensive analytics and data available, so you can assess the process. Lastly, we have our translation service. We have both human translators and a machine translation service to ensure your marketing emails are are well cared for. Because once an email is sent, you can't update it. So we do recommend human translation for email marketing.

Advantages of AI-Powered Translations

• Lives in your TMS. One of the benefits of using an AI-powered translation management system is you're going to fully automate everything that surrounds the human translation process. When you're talking about scalability across email and other content types, what you also want to do is centralize all of your assets. With Smartling, all content lives in your TMS. Your source content is in the TMS, but more importantly, your translations are in the TMS. And you can leave them there or you can export them.
• Supports your translators. AI-powered translations also enables your translators. One of the really remarkable attributes of Smartling is that we can pre-populate every single translator's workbench with machine translations — before they even start doing the human translation. This enables a high-velocity translation.
• Quality checks. We also have programmatic quality checks. We have 30 or so built into the platform. These automatically look for typos, extra spaces, or tags that are being inconsistently handled. Then, the platform can block a translator from submitting work with errors that are automatically identified. This is useful to customers because it means they don't have to do detail checking work, and there's no back and forth when errors are actually found.
• Dynamic workflows and free-flowing content. Lastly, we have a very advanced workflow engine that identifies what content has been previously translated by a human. It then assesses how much human input is required to get the content to a professional, high-quality level. You can pre-program how that will work based on what content is in the translation memory, and how much the content has changed. There are a lot of ways to configure it, but it's a fast way of programming content to get through a workflow as quickly as possible.

Additional reading: Six Ways Smartling is Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Right Now

Dyspatch: Vero Best

Perfect Pairing: Dyspatch + Smartling

Before we move on, it’s worth noting using Dyspatch and Smartling together is the ultimate pairing. Dyspatch makes the email part a cinch, and Smartling handles translations and localizations expertly. This combo is super powerful, and it’s the easiest way we’ve found to actually scale your email localization strategy.

Case Study: How a Fortune 500 Company Improved Time to Market by 250%

Next, we’ll cover a fun case study about a gigantic company, an 11 billion dollar household name. We’re not allowed to mention their name specifically, but they’ve been a customer of Dyspatch for many years.

With Dyspatch, they improved their time to market by 250%. So they went from months to weeks to get their localized email templates to market. And they’re down to days to get templates out when they make a change.

Workflow Before Dyspatch

This is what their process looked like to start. I’m not even going to unpack it because you can see there are multiple spreadsheets, word documents, steps, and approvals. And multiple place for changes to be requested, which slowed down time to market even more. A lot of stakeholders weren’t satisfied with this workflow as well. They felt like they weren’t being heard at the right parts of the process.

Workflow After Dyspatch

Fast forward to what they were able to achieve with Dyspatch. So at the beginning, all they have is one document, which is basically an email brief. From there, they create the template in Dyspatch using reusable content.

It's quick to make new content. As we mentioned, they export the translatable content as a POT file. They manage the translation process. (Thank you Smartling!) Once they have the translations back, they upload those files into Dyspatch. The template is submitted to the single right person for approval once.

By the way, anybody can view the progress at any stage. Even if you aren’t the decision maker or the key stakeholder, you can make sure the design doesn’t change or other aspects stay on track. At the end, anybody can provide feedback, including the approver.

A template can be finished and ready to send in a couple of days at this point. So we’ve gone from this massive, all-too recognizable workflow to one that feels really efficient. It feels scalable. There are way fewer errors and stakeholders feel like they're able to give input at the right times, without having to chase folks for outcomes.

We've repeated this now with so many customers in Dyspatch who told us, “You know, we're localizing our emails. It's fine, but it could be better.” Now, it's one of the key reasons they stay with Dyspatch, and they've been able to scale a lot more than they expected.

Additional reading: White Paper - Localizing Your Email Templates at Scale

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

The Localization Step

Now, I’ll speak to the step of managing the localization process itself. Smartling sits between Dyspatch and your end users. We’re the layer that provides the translation engine.

Our objective is to sit between Dyspatch and other content platforms and your end user, while offering the minimum friction possible. To enable scalability, programmatic quality, predictable analytics, and insights that help you drive a high-quality user experience — every single day.

Dyspatch: Vero Best

Key Takeaways

• A solid localization strategy will increase your ROI. This point speaks for itself! A solid localization strategy, with the right tools in place, will increase your ROI. That means, it’s worth the investment. Email's a great channel for this because the ROI is higher than a lot of other marketing channels. And really, if you're a customer-centric company, email localization is a great way to build trust with your customers. Simply put, you’re communicating with them in a way that resonates.
• Software can help multiply an email into many languages without sacrificing quality. Scaling your email efforts, while maintaining or improving quality, will always pay off. And software can help multiply your efforts. You can multiply your translations into many markets without sacrificing quality.
• You need the right solutions to meet customers where they are. This one speaks for itself too. You need the right solutions to serve your customers, where they are. And I know it's easy to get started with Smartling and Dyspatch. At Dyspatch, we have options for all size teams, as well as monthly and annual payment plans. I believe Smartling offers flexible options too.

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

Yes, it really is so easy to get started with Smartling. We have different ways to buy the product. You can pay as you go. So if you're new to translation, and you want to dip your toes in the water, you can literally pay on a monthly basis for what you translate.

Or if you're a well-established company — like the one described earlier that clearly has a huge translation volume — you might want more economy of scale. In which case, we have a great solution for that as well.

Q&A

Q: How do you handle QA and testing (version control) after the template has been translated?

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

A: The most meaningful way to proactively manage your translation quality — and ensure you're internally reviewing it so it checks all the boxes — is to go into Smartling and add the internal reviewer as part of the translation workflow. That way, all of the translations are edited in the translation management system, updated by the internal reviewer, and every update commits the most recently reviewed translation to the translation memory.

So if you go to reuse the content, you're always using a version that's been approved. Now, we have many different ways you can internally review the content. But there's a piece of technology we developed called monolingual review. What monolingual review allows the peer reviewer to do is only review the translations. They're not comparing the source to the target. They're just looking at the translated email.

It's a simplified experience. It's really easy to use, and you can go through the whole email very quickly and check the boxes to make sure everything is done right. And it's also really easy to make small edits in the monolingual review. But the full ‘cat tool’ is available to users. So if the internal reviewer wanted to do a comprehensive sweep of the content, or have the ability to look at the source and the target together, they have that flexibility as well.

Dyspatch: Vero Best

Okay, let's assume the template's back in Dyspatch. The translations are done, but for whatever reason, you need to quickly make a change. So in Dyspatch, if you make a change in one place you can make sure the string has been updated everywhere. Whatever small change you made to a block takes effect in all the templates that are using that particular bit of content.

We call this bulk apply — where you make a change in one place and it takes effect everywhere else. It will still maintain its integrity, as it's been tested. You know it'll render properly on mobile and on desktop. We take that to heart. That's one of the guard rails that Dyspatch provides.

Additionally, if you do need to make a small change back in Dyspatch, you can just resend one part of the content, instead of sending the whole template again to be reviewed. That speeds up the time to market. It doesn’t take as long to get the translation back, and also really cuts down on the cost.

Of course, you could also make the change in Dyspatch yourself. That is, if you knew what the translation was or you had it somewhere else. But if you wanted to resend just that one bit of content, it's easy to do that and make sure it applies to all the templates using the same string.

Q: How do you upload a style guide to Smartling?

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

A: The short answer is, this functionality is built into Smartling. You have the ability to add a style guide and a glossary, which informs the translators specifically on how to handle your content. There are many companies in the same space that have totally different brands, and we talk about the same thing differently. But our objective is to ensure our customers’ brand voice is transferred into different languages.

The style guide is templatized in Smartling, so you can add a certain level of detail about your brand. You can also attach documents to the style guide. For example, you might have global brand book guidelines. You could attach that document to the style guide. Then, every single time your translators go to work on the content, they’ll get a window that pops up that says review the brand guidelines.

Then, they’ll have the opportunity to read through what your preferences are. Do you want the translations to be formal? Do you want them to be playful? Are there any editorial style guides you have? You can offer any of these instructions in the style guide. Furthermore, you could customize the style guide for every single market. So if there's one market where you want it to be a little bit more playful, you can customize the guide. That way, every market is handled as you want it.

Q: Can you elaborate on the takeaway, “Software can help multiply an email into many languages without sacrificing quality”?

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

A: The challenges most businesses have to think about are speed, quality, and cost. When you’re trying to do something at the scale of an enterprise, this is a constant struggle. You almost certainly need to get things out faster than you actually can. You always want to ensure the quality is exceptional. And you're trying to do this at the lowest possible cost.

So we believe that by using software, you can achieve a blend of the speed, quality, and cost objectives. And you can start to strip away some of the risk that are inherently involved with a manual process. Here’s a small example:

You’re an English-speaking marketer, and you create a marketing email. Then, you go and translate it into Japanese — but you don't speak Japanese! So you're not going to be the most qualified person to copy and paste Japanese strings into an email. To know exactly where you should break a line.

This is an issue that software eliminates. And it will ensure a level of quality not just across one string, email, or language, but across your entire localization program.

Dyspatch: Vero Best

I'd like to add that Dyspatch can help with this as well. I talked earlier about workflows about making sure the right person sees something. So using Dyspatch to store all of your emails makes it really easy to find and reuse content — without having to start from scratch every time.

For example, if you identified a high performing email in your last campaign, and you want to tweak it and reuse it, you can do that really easily. And Dyspatch makes that like a couple of clicks worth of work.

Q: Any advice or best practices for managing template variations?

Dyspatch: Vero Best

A: There's no one solution to getting this right. I think services like Smartling can help out with this a lot. On the Dyspatch side, testing is a big part of it. Just making sure you're getting it right by going through our built-in approval workflows.

Smartling: Adrian Cohn

If you're running a larger localization program, this is also where teamwork comes into play. You need to work with local marketers and local legal counsel to ensure you have the right information embedded within your template variations. If that content needs to be translated, you need to make sure you’re working with qualified translators. For example, you don't want a translator with zero legal expertise or to be translating terms and conditions.

So it's important, when you work with a language services provider like Smartling, that you know the translator is able to manage the content at hand. Furthermore, you may not want the same translator who’s doing the legal content to do the marketing content. This is where Smartling’s workflows come in handy too. You can easily direct certain content to a marketing translator, and other content to a legal translator in the platform.