Email marketing continues to be unmatched when it comes to return on investment—an impressive $36 for every $1 spent, in fact. When used correctly and tailored to the individual, it’s well known by now that email can be a real powerhouse for brands. But as brands grow and build a presence globally, building and maintaining that 1:1 connection with customers becomes more challenging.
This is where email localization plays a pivotal role in ensuring your messages resonate across different countries, cultures, and languages.
Keep reading to explore how brands can use email localization to build customer trust and engagement with real-world examples to inspire your global email marketing strategy.
What is email localization?
Email localization is the process of adapting email content to cater to the languages, cultures, and geographic regions of individual recipients. While many people mistakenly think localization simply involves translating content into different languages, large global brands with millions of customers understand that it goes much deeper than that.
From subject lines and imagery to offerings and timing, localization means recipients get emails that are sensitive to and closely aligned with their regional interests and preferences. A lot of local nuances can get lost in direct translations.
Email localization best practices
Get the subject line right
When crafting an email for audiences in multiple regions, consider keeping your subject line short and simple. What occupies 50 characters (which is the recommended length) in English can take up considerably more space in other languages. For example, “Hurry! Sale ends today” translates to a much longer piece of text in French: “Dépêchez-vous! Les ventes se terminent aujourd’hui.” In many cases, you might want to create different subject lines for various languages to avoid truncation in your users’ inboxes.
Consider your email content
Engaging your global email audience means writing content that’s locally relevant and considers cultural nuances for every campaign. Remember Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign? They didn’t just use generic names on their bottles across the world. They personalized labels with popular names and terminology specific to each country, creating an emotional connection wherever a customer purchased their product.
Sephora’s location-based welcome email shows just how carefully they tailor their messaging to different geographic areas. The US version focuses on what the subscriber can expect from the brand’s emails and shares links to their online store and Beauty Insiders Club. The Italian version, on the other hand, includes a more detailed welcome message, promotes a special offer, and shares social media links. Both versions welcome new subscribers but with different messaging and design layouts based on the location of their users.
Send locally relevant offers
Customers are more likely to engage with offers that are personally relevant and tailored to their individual circumstances compared to generic promotions. Fashion brand H&M, for example, makes sure they send locally relevant offers by asking customers for their country and postal code during the email subscription process on their website.
Danish retail chain Jysk localizes its coupon distribution by applying the correct currency based on what it knows about its customers’ location. In the example below, the brand gives a £5 voucher to—you guessed it–UK-based subscribers.
Be conscious of timing
Timing is a critical factor when scheduling a campaign across multiple countries. Sending emails at the right time, taking into account time zones and cultural habits, can significantly impact open and click-through rates.
Expedia sends promotional emails notifying users of special offers for their saved travel destinations, which are based on each recipient’s time zone, ensuring users receive them when they are most likely to take action.
On the other hand, this tapas restaurant received some negative feedback for sending a 40% off promotion when it was too late for recipients to take advantage of the offer, highlighting the importance of considering the time zones of your recipients.
However, timing isn’t just about time zones; it’s also about seasonality. A global retailer promoting its winter clothing sale in January should consider creating different email content for its Australian audience, who are in the midst of their summer season.
Scaling your email localization strategy
Brands that use dynamic, localized content in their email campaigns have been known to increase ROI by up to 100%. To unlock the full potential of your global email engagement strategy, schedule a demo with a MessageGears expert who can guide you in creating a localization strategy that’s smooth, accurate, and scalable.
Learn more:
- [Case study] Culver’s Empowers Local Messaging with MessageGears + Sageflo
- [Webinar] Creating Local Messaging that Works
- [Blog article] Your Go-to Guide to Location-based Marketing
