Building a Frame for Multilingual Email Marketing
“Languages and cultures have infinite opportunities to offer” says Lisa Alain from LAT Multilingual, a US-based company specialized in marketing and translations. We and probably a large number of enterprises think so. Now, we should go one, two or three steps forward and start thinking of strategies and instruments to actually materialize those opportunities. In this article, I want to focus particularly on multicultural marketing as a frame for multilingual email marketing, one of the core services of the company I work for.
To us, writing about multilingual email marketing is not only a matter of offering you good tips [hopefully] for your email marketing campaigns. It is also crucial to build a sort of basis in which the topic rests safe and from where it can deploy its whole potential. Let’s get started!
Noticeably, Wikipedia and other online definitions give to multicultural marketing a purely ethnic tinge. Whether we borrow and blend some of those definitions, multicultural marketing has to do with deploying marketing efforts to reach “certain ethnicities” which, so far, are not part of the general market (the country’s majority culture). Now, from our point of view, that approach makes fully sense in countries where immigration is a pretty new phenomenon or where transcultural processes are in progress or have just started; however, in Europe, where all the bloods have lived together for a while, multicultural marketing takes another dimension: it is less about ethnicity and more about people’s cultural backgrounds, which less and less are related to their ethnicity. In any case, embracing multicultural marketing as a strategy necessarily obliges enterprises to rethink their whole marketing strategy.
If your objective is increasing your market share within a multicultural country or reaching audiences in other countries, multilingual marketing is the main instrument multicultural marketing uses. The language is the engine of any culture. It is categorically simple: without languages – including the non-verbal type – there is nothing to say.
Multilingual marketing is intended to support companies’ capabilities to build or make their brands stronger. It’s about translating what you want to say to culturally diverse audiences into different languages, isn’t it? Yes! But it is more than that. Understanding how the message might be taken for each particular cultural audience is crucial for effectiveness and, in order to do that, the cultural background needs to be known and understood as the very first step. And yes, again: all this is definitely challenging.
Building Trust
In our information society, where everything is going online – and mobile – and where customers (people or companies) are more and more educated using almost-endless web information possibilities, content marketing plays a fundamental role to connect with them, to offer the information they require to take the purchasing decision we always expect and to build trust among them. We just have written “build trust”. Is there a more effective way for trust building than talking with you in your language and understanding what you may expect from me based on your personal and cultural preferences?
Let’s go over the path followed in our discussion: multicultural marketing has to do with multilingual marketing which, in turn, must be applied to content marketing which – and this is a new stop on the path – is closely connected to social media marketing. Does it make sense? We think it does.
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action. (The Content Marketing Institute)
Email Marketing
Emails and social networks are great teammates: both are “means” to spread great content. Businesses may use them to reach different audiences or perhaps to engage the same audience at different stages of the buying process. When emails are part of a list that has been built responsibly, they talk more intimately with their receivers. For emails to be effective carriers of great content, a well-designed multilingual email marketing strategy and a content plan are needed. And again we should remember: multilingual it is not only about translation, but translation and adaptation of the original message considering the culture of our leads or customers. This process is called transcreation.
Transcreated content is whatever content format whose central topic, structure and some of its main facts remain similar to created created in a different source language, but localized and adapted to cultural characteristics of your customers.
Well-designed multilingual content and email marketing strategy
What we meant with that title is basically planning. And planning is translated into objectives, capabilities, resources and time. Whatever campaign your business wants to run online must have two characteristics for success: consistency and long duration. Of course, these characteristics also apply to any content activity, multilingual or not.
If the objective you have in mind is to develop an effective multilingual marketing campaign, we suggest you to give a glance, primarily, at your team. Does it have the capabilities to conduct multilingual marketing campaigns? Not only wonder how many languages your team can communicate with prospects and customers, but rather think of their cultural background (undoubtedly, this is the point when immigration, diversity, inclusion management, marketing and globalization converge). Then, think of the market you want to knock the door or you may be already knocking the door. Is it assorted, linguistically and culturally speaking? Are your professionals able to “transcreate” your content so that it can reach, convince and convert those assorted leads and customers? Does your team reflect that diversity?
Reaching a multilingual market also calls for thinking of a broader stakeholders’ frame. Because it is more than likely to have diverse stakeholders when addressing multilingual market segments, enterprises must also balance what their capabilities are to reach them and engage with them, especially if they are decisive or exert certain power on buying trends the targeted multilingual groups may have.
To sum up, we considered really important to frame “the multilingual fact” in marketing as a starting point for any campaign which aims at reaching a diverse audience. Now we know it essentially starts up with ethnicities or languages but, ultimately, it is about understanding those “alien” customs (sometimes!) and ways of thinking of people we haven’t commonly met in our lives, to make them more familiar to us and to talk with them more frankly, intelligently and straightforward. Only then, we will be ready to offer them valuable product and services and grow our business.
