What is the best way to learn a prospect's preferred language?

Andrew_Sarmient
Level 1

What is the best way to learn a prospect's preferred language?

Hi!

Some Context:

Our business deals heavily with international prospects, and as of now we currently build all of our emails as dynamic emails based on a language preference segment. However, the actual information we have on what language segment a prospect belongs to is lacking. Our website has different pages, forms, and utm parameters set up so if someone requests a demo, they will  receive the correct language based on what form they fill as they will be added to the correct segment. But this only accounts for a fraction of our database as we rely heavily on list building, and we recently started nurturing efforts for our old cold leads before these practices were put into place.

The issue:

Since we have such a large amount of people in the default segment, which results in an english email, when we know from our market that we are marketing mostly to people who do not speak english, at least as their first language, we were planning on using Country as a segment criteria for Spanish and Portuguese. Obviously there are some issues with assuming that everyone in Brazil would have Portuguese as their preferred language for example, but we think it would be a more accurate starting point.

What we want to do:

If we are going to make this assumption, we want to offer a way for anyone receiving an email from us to indicate their preferred language, but we are having trouble finding a solution for this that is also not a bad user experience. We could:

  1. Include a link to a preference center or even more simple just a preferred language form. We would try to rely on some iconography to make it obvious.
    • The biggest issue we have with this is, if someone could not understand the language of an email, why would they fill out a form? Especially for colder leads it seems like a lot of expectations to have for a prospect to engage in this way
  2. Include a clickable button or link that would trigger the data value change in Marketo anytime one of the options are clicked. I.e. a few flag icons at the top of an email, that can be clicked without redirecting
    • Aside from changing the language segment in Marketo we could possibly including a transactional email confirming the change in a prospect's preferred language. BUT ideally, we would like to resend the exact same email in the newly requested language.

If we go with option 2, how can we create a centralized smart campaign that would recognize which email the language link was clicked from and resend that specific email? We could include a request smart campaign as part of every future state email send, but that seems clunky and would involve a lot of requested smart campaigns, which I have heard can slow down a Marketo instance.

Does anyone have a solution to how we can trigger this for any email, but send a specific email? We would also appreciate any insights into a better way to segment our leads by language if anyone has any ideas. Thanks!

1 REPLY 1
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: What is the best way to learn a prospect's preferred language?

Does anyone have a solution to how we can trigger this for any email, but send a specific email?

Yes, you leverage the Forward To Friend function. That's the only function that is capable of accepting an email identifier (mkt_tok) as a parameter and re-sending that same email, without separately maintain the list of emails.

We could include a request smart campaign as part of every future state email send, but that seems clunky and would involve a lot of requested smart campaigns, which I have heard can slow down a Marketo instance.

I wouldn't worry about having the Campaign is Requested triggers listening, it's how often they're used that's the question here.