Localization process inside of Marketo, SFMC background

[Anonymous]

Hi, my company is making the move over to Marketo so I'm fairly new to the platform.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the best way to setup my emails so Marketo serves

up the correctly translated creative base on a user's language preference.

I come from a Salesforce Marketing Cloud background and typically what I do is store

whole HTML documents inside of code snippets and from there I write a basic

conditional logic that says something like:

if language == ko {
  render korean html document
} 
else {
  render english html document
}

(For some reason the HTML view of the code isn't work)

But with Marketo, my understanding is that Tokens are used and can be setup to

swap out snippets of texts base on a language Segment.

(Sorry if my nomenclature is off, it's been literally 2 weeks since the Marketo on-site training and I'm still getting acclimated.)

This seems a bit highly in-efficient to me as it's possible for me to be in a situation

where I need to send multiple emails out to 20+ different languages.

Can someone give me some advice or clarity on this topic?

Thank you in advance.

[Denise_Greenb12]

Hi Quang,

20+ languages sounds like quite a challenge. One way to do this would be to use a combination of Segmentation and Dynamic Content. For the Segmentation, you'd create a segmentation called, say, "Language" and within that you'd have segments for each of the languages. See: Create a Segmentation - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation.

Then within each email, you'd assign a different version of the various copy modules to the appropriate segment: Using Dynamic Content in an Email - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation.

You could also have 20 different emails (one per language) and use a smart campaign to send the right one based on the Segmentation or a Language field.

However, either of those methods would be pretty labor-intensive if every email has to have 20+ different versions. I don't know whether or not there is some way to code the different language choices into the email HTML or not. Somebody else in the community may have a better idea.

Denise

[SanfordWhiteman]

Quang, can you move this thread to the central Community discussion area at Products​?  This is a members-only group and I just happened to see your thread because I follow Denise. 

In short the equivalent to the SFMC conditional content in Marketo is a Velocity ("Email Script") token. Velocity is a extraordinarily robust customization language based on Java (and which predates Marketo itself). It can check the lead's language and render content accordingly -- that's one of its core competencies.