Best practice for multilingual marketing activities?

[Daniel_Koch]

Hi,

Our core business is located in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) but a couple of weeks ago we started to attract English speaking user's attention. Additional to our marketing activities in German we're planning to set up marketing activities in English.

My questions are:

1. What are your good or bad experiences concerning setting up multilingual marketing activities?

2. For newsletters: Would you recommend multilingual programs or one program for each language? (I know this depends on the target of the campaign, but I think both ways have some advantages and disadvantages)

3. What are your experiences with segmentation?

Looking forward to discussing and sharing thoughts with you.

Greetings,

Daniel

[Frank_Breen2]

People will have many different solutions here, but here's how we do it for a Single Workspace setup:

1. What are your good or bad experiences concerning setting up multilingual marketing activities?

Our focus language is English but most of our Global Campaigns are in German, Spanish, Italian and French, to do this we create the master program in the main language and then nest the translated communication in Emails Send program, like this:

Our content is tokenised so this structure works well, as we create our main language content in the Main Program, then we can override every token in each nested email program, this makes it quick and easy to change the content plus we can reuse common tokens through all sends without doing any extra work.

Also note having everything 100% translated in language for that market works better and you'll see a bigger pickup in your marketing activities than only communicating in your local language, i.e. English language people may not know German and vice versa.

2. For newsletters: Would you recommend multilingual programs or one program for each language? (I know this depends on the target of the campaign, but I think both ways have some advantages and disadvantages)

We use the above setup.

3. What are your experiences with segmentation?

Language segmentation works well and is a solution I have deployed before, one drawback is that if you use language as a segmentation you can't then do further segmentation on that down the line as people can only be in one segment at a time, i.e. if you wanted to send an email to people in Education and in English, then you will have to be in one or the other.

[SanfordWhiteman]

if you wanted to send an email to people in Education and in English, then you will have to be in one or the other.

If those are segments within the same segmentation, they could only be in one at any given point in time, but why would those 2 terms be under the same segmentation?

I think you mean that they can be in Industry/Education and Language/English simultaneously, but the same dynamic snippet can't have a many-to-many matrix of variations. Which is true, but it's one of the reasons that Iryna and I like Velocity scripts instead, since you can mix-and-match any segmentations you want that way.

[SanfordWhiteman]

And also Iryna Zhuravel​ and Frank Breen​ maybe we should collaborate on an infographic/explainer blog post together about this! I don't think there's a spot where the options for multilingual emails are laid out in a matrix, with checkboxes for which features are supported by each approach 'n' such. Interested at all?

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Sanford Whiteman that's a really great idea, I would love to, I am on a biz trip to China at the moment, will be back to the US on November 5th, let's jump on a call sometime after that.

[Frank_Breen2]

Sanford Whiteman I'd also be happy to help on that.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Great ​​​Frank Breen​Iryna Zhuravel​! Send me an email when you're ready so we can coordinate. I have so many blog drafts to publish, but maybe this'll get in ahead of those with the peer pressure.

[Daniel_Koch]

Thank you very much Frank for your answer. Sounds really good to me! 🙂

[Josh_Hill13]

I would use a Language Preference or Country field with a Segmentation and Dynamic Content. Frank is right that there are pros and cons to each approach.

This is pretty well documented if you do a search on the community here along with Dynamic Content and Segmentations in docs.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

We localize in 8 different languages, use segmentation and dynamic content extensively, but I am currently rebuilding the whole thing.

I would strongly recommend using language preference field in conjunction with country/region and not to assume that people want to receive content in certain language just because they are from a specific country, we had a lot of issues with that.

I used to be a big fan of dynamic content, but recently I saw the light and we are now moving to scripted tokens   imho they are much-much more scalable and convenient