There are around 333.2 billion emails sent and received each day in 2022, from roughly 4.3 billion email accounts! With such wide-ranging adoption of email, it’s no wonder it produces the highest ROI of any marketing channel around.
But ROI can always be improved—in fact, brands that use dynamic, localized content in emails have been known to increase email ROI by 100%!
Do you want to swiftly 2X your email ROI? Of course you do. And that’s precisely where email localization comes in to save the day. Let’s dig in.
What is Email Localization?
Email localization is the process of adapting email content to ensure recipients receive emails that are translated to their language, and relevant to their region and culture.
When you localize emails, you’re not only translating the content into multiple languages, you’re also catering the entire email to the locale of the recipient. From subject lines to imagery, email localization ensures recipients are receiving an email they’re most likely to engage with.
Localized Email: Dynamic, Personal, Segmented
As email marketing has evolved over the years, we’ve all become accustomed to hearing about the benefits of tactics like:
- Dynamic content: adding, removing, or replacing certain parts of your email content based on the recipient’s preferences.
- Personalization: leveraging the data you have on your recipients to make the email seem like it was written personally for them.
- Segmentation: breaking your recipients out into cohorts based on demographics, geographics, or other targeting specifications.
Email content localization in a way encompasses all of the above, to deliver content to your recipients that suits their interests, speaks to them as an individual, and even speaks to them in their own language!
Email Personalization vs. Email Localization
Let’s be honest with each other for a minute: if your email isn’t written in your recipient’s language, how personalized is it really??
Merge fields to capture {customer.firstname} only go so far… If the only thing I can understand in your email is my name, it could be detrimental to your brand.
Lost subscribers, low email engagement, weak conversion rates, and an overall bad taste in the mouth can result from not localizing your emails. Can you afford that?
To put it simply, If your emails aren’t localized, they aren’t really personalized.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Is your product or service available in multiple languages?
- Is your target audience spread across various regions?
- Do your recipient cohorts have unique needs?
- Do you want to have a strong and lasting impact on your readers?
- Do you want to expand your brand’s reach to new audiences?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then localizing your content is the next logical step towards email marketing victory.
Email Translation vs. Email Localization
You are probably already aware that email localizations means translating the language of your email to your recipient’s native tongue, but localized content doesn’t stop at text.
A “locale” is more than just a “language”, and emails are more than just text. Email localization is inclusive of all your email’s content:
- The text,
- The images,
- The layout,
- The design,
- The interactive elements.
All of the above can be adapted to suit the language, locale, and culture of the reader.
Things to Remember When Localizing Email
Localizing your emails means you don’t send an email talking about “Escaping the Cold!” to someone living in sunny Florida.
It means your email subject stands out in your recipients’ inboxes because they get to read it in their own language or alphabet.
It means your text flows in the right direction (some cultures read right to left!).
It means your buttons sit on the side your readers are looking at, encouraging conversion and increasing clickthrough rates.
Most importantly, content localization means you are being empathetic to the needs of your audience, and are showing an effort towards making their experience with your brand a memorable one.
I know what you’re thinking, this sounds like a LOT of work. If you’re speaking to ten different cultures, doesn’t that mean you have to do 10X the amount of work?
Nope! Products like Dyspatch provide workflows and tools to make email localization quick, easy, and—most importantly—correct. Instead of wasting time plugging data into spreadsheets and writing out translation docs, your team can build localized emails directly in app, and see exactly how the translated emails will look and behave in your recipient’s inbox (on any device!)
How to do Email Localization like a pro
Okay, so you’re sold on the concept, you want to localize your emails moving forward. GREAT!
I know I said it wasn’t a ton of work, and it’s not as much as you think. That being said, localizing your email is not a one step process. The good news is that there are great products out there today—like Dyspatch!—that can help you simplify email localization.
Managing your localization process in your email sending platform (ESP) alone is going to get unmanageable the more languages and locales you want. And you’ll always want more—it’s highly addictive and satisfying.
ESPs can use complex templating to swap content for each language and locale— ballooning the size of your email template, making localizing to more than a couple of locales a painstaking process.
Either that, or you might need to juggle multiple versions of your email for each locale, which is somewhat preferable (just a bit, but not really).
Or you can localize your emails like a pro!
As I said earlier, it doesn’t have to be so much work! Services like Smartling and LionBridge can help you adapt your email content quickly. While products like Dyspatch can help your team design and organize your emails and localizations without having to rely on the basic editor in your ESP.
With Dyspatch, you can:
- Send your content to your localization service (ie. Smartling) in one click.
- Export your email and its many localized versions into your sending platform with another single click.
- Log in to your ESP and use it to do what they do best: send your localized emails!
Like many things in life, there’s a harder way and a smarter way to localize your email content. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re interested in doing it smarter.
Next steps…
Ready to put your localization to work for your brand? Contact us or book a demo and we’ll show you how Dyspatch can help your team create a smooth and systematized email localization process.
To learn more about Email Localization check out our Localization White Paper!
