How To Tackle Multilingual Email Marketing Strategies
Email marketing can soon become a living nightmare for startups and small businesses. With low budgets and fierce competition, it’s the marketing tool that most new companies have turned to. Can it become less rejected by the recipient? After all, it’s a lot cheaper than Adwords, right?
Unfortunately, as the number of startups and inbound marketing campaigns increase, more and more executives say they have become plagued by the endless amount of marketing emails that fill up their spam box daily.
The question is, does it work anyways? Can this form of marketing gain enough exposure to offset the rejection attitude of the recipient?
If you get it right then you can enjoy increased profits without delving too much into your marketing budget. You’re also looking at a better relationship with customers. It’s the best way to keep everyone informed about company updates and entice them in with tempting offers they can’t resist!
So you’ve spent a lot of time perfecting these emails.
In the ideal world, every subscriber reads them, learns about the promotions, and becomes a customer. Sounds simple, but as with most things — there’s a lot more to it.
Problems that may occur down the line:
You have no idea how to manage your mailing list
We’ve been there too! Countless hours spent trying to sort different workflows, who receives what, attempting to distinguish between existing clients and potential customers — it’s never ending!
If you sail through this process with no hurdles, then count yourself lucky.
Learn how to manage segments. Mailchimp is a well-known mailing manager that helps you to separate your subscribers into different categories by segmentation. You can use different demographics such as age and gender in each workflow so that every email is tailored to make sure it catches their eye.
You want to address different markets
By doing so you need to create an email campaign for each country that you want to market your products to. Creating a workflow for each of the languages can get pretty hectic but it can be done! One solution to this is using a CRM that is synched with your translations solutions via API. By doing this, you can work on dynamic HTMLs to create different versions of the same content. Consider it a little bit like A/B testing, learning through trial and error. Think of it as A being one language and B being another. You can go through the whole alphabet and see which combination works best.
Your open rate is looking pretty pathetic
In an article written by Jay Baer on Convince&Convert, it concludes that 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. Think about it, are you really going to open emails that contain ‘inviting’ phrases like ‘free gift’, ‘20% off’ or ‘you don’t want to miss this’. You know exactly what these companies are trying to do.
On 500’s blog, Susan Su states that the average person receives 500 marketing emails per month. No one is going to waste hours of their time opening every single one!
You have to make subscribers think it’s not just another marketing email. Make the subject line stand out. The other day, I was searching through my spam box when an email titled ‘inefficiency scales with you’ caught my eye and I instantly clicked on it to find out what on earth it was about. It played on my emotions, clever huh? Subjects are make or break. 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. In other words, they are the decider of whether the subscriber is going to open the email.
Alternatively, although not recommended, use the ‘Re’ or ‘Fwd’ tactic. This is smart and it fools me every time. When I see one of these words in an email I don’t recognise, a mini wave of panic sets in. It makes me think that I’ve forgotten to reply to an important work email. Once subscribers get into the email, they are more likely to pay attention because they are impressed at how you caught them out (well in my case anyway!). Bad emotional attachment created, though. I usually end up hating the sender…
You have no visibility of results
Once the email campaign is created and perfected, it’s easy to put it to the back of your mind. It’s vital to check and interpret the reports. Don’t just focus on how many people open your emails, you have to investigate further. How many people clicked on links? How many bounced? Did anyone complain? Did anyone unsubscribe?
These are key indicators of where you may or may not be going wrong. Can you do anything to improve these metrics? They give you an idea of how your subscribers are reacting to the email content. It helps you figure out what attracts their attention most. What kind of subject line has the highest open rate? Are they more likely to click a link if it’s personalised?
You have thousands of subscribers yet none of them are interested
Out of the 500 marketing emails a person receives every month, how many do you actually think are relevant to your interests? My guess is not many.
If you haven’t got a great list of recipients then you’re wasting money. A person signs up to a newsletter because they want to receive information on a certain topic.
It’s about quality not quantity. Yes, you may think 10,000 subscribers is impressive and is bound to drive new sales. But what if they’re not the right target audience?
Take students for example, they’re not going read marketing emails about gardening products or savvy kitchen appliances (well the chances are very slim at least).
Having too many subscribers could harm your business. You don’t want to be seen as a spammer. If it’s not relevant to their interests then they will become disengaged and most likely, unsubscribe.
You want to appeal to people that will actually take notice of what you have to offer. High quality subscribers = improved conversion rates. Think about ways that you can find more of them. Maybe a competition — enter your details and win a gift for free? Advertise on certain platforms that are related to your company’s offerings? The possibilities are endless.
So, how are your email marketing campaigns going? Let us know your thoughts!
GearTranslations offers professional translations and multilingual content creation for technical sectors such as IT, Finance, Health, Safety, Legal, Pharma, and Manufacturing. Accurate, professional translations and creative content are a vital component in the internationalisation of your business to break down the language barriers that prevent fluid communication with international consumers, foreign distributors, and foreign suppliers in any market overseas.
We offer 24/7 access to our online platform, speedy delivery of up to 5 hours, a cloud-based back-up copy for all previous translations. Our personalised translation library means you can save costs in the long run and our unique algorithm lets you capitalise on each translation, transforming your multilingual content into valuable assets for your company.
We’re a startup that values expansion at a global level. We understand that internationalisation entails many challenges because we ourselves have been there too when we expanded into new foreign markets. So, are you ready to embark on the internalisation journey, launch into new market destinations, and drive sales abroad? Contact us. Our translation service and multilingual content copywriting is the door to expand your business! We have a team of talented linguists, software developers, and creative millennials ready to help you improve your multilingual communications.
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