When it comes to reaching people with truly tailored communications, email localization is one of the most crucial things you can do.
It’s difficult to overcome the linguistic and cultural divide when trying to contact customers all over the world. As a result, localization improves the relevance of your material to your target audience. It also shows that you care about your target audience’s needs, attitudes, and interests, which are influenced by their geography.
We’ll go over email localization design strategies in this article. These pointers will assist you in better engaging with your clients and readers all around the world.
1. Consider Time Zones When Sending Localized Emails
Remember that when sending emails to recipients on the other side of the world, they are not in the same time zone. As a result, if you were planning to send an email to a local audience in the middle of the night, reconsider.
Emails sent late at night or during non-peak read rate periods may not receive the attention they deserve.
Consider this: when you check your email first thing in the morning, don’t you prefer to swipe away marketing emails?
So, how can you address this problem and ensure that your recipients receive their emails at the most convenient times of the day?
To begin, double-check that you’re in the correct time zone for your target audience. It can be difficult to plan email send-outs according to certain segments of the audience when you’re juggling multiple national audiences all over the world, all in different time zones.
The simplest method is to utilize a time zone calculator, enter your time, and see what time it is in the country of your target audience.
Begin by scheduling emails to arrive in recipients’ inboxes between 10 and 11 a.m. local time. When they are awake and active, they will receive both the email and the notice. The best time to send an email campaign, according to WordStream and their statistics from their own email campaigns, is Thursdays between 8 and 10 a.m.
Finally, if you’re sending emails to people from all over the world, you’ll have to do a lot of testing to locate the sweet spot for timing localization. Keep in mind that no two cultures interact with emails in the same manner. Following the launch of your advertising, you should begin monitoring and analytics to see how recipients from various cultures react.
2. Understand The Culture Before You Send That Email
Relevance should be your top priority. You risk losing consumers and subscribers if you don’t align your email localization to the target culture and send an email without a thorough understanding of the culture.
How can you make sure your email is relevant to the person receiving it?
Use the correct currency symbols, date formats, and time zones.
Readers appreciate knowing that you went to the trouble of translating all of your currencies, dates, and other culturally unique stuff into their language. This demonstrates your attention to detail, which is extremely important in intercultural communication.
Make sure that any cultural references, slang, or idioms are relatable to your target audience.
Incorporating cultural allusions that the target audience would respond to is the easiest approach to build relevance quickly. However, ensure that you consult specialists and that you understand what you’re doing, as mistakes can be costly. You may discover native translators using services like The Word Point to translate your promotional texts effortlessly into the target language.
Understand how your product or service is useful to that audience in particular, not a general audience.
Don’t send generic letters to all the cultures you work with or sell to; instead, focus on your audience’s interests. Tailoring your material to a specific culture will result in much higher open and engagement rates.
Use local testimonials and endorsements.
Include evaluations and testimonials that are relevant to the local audience if you’re using the testimonial marketing strategy (which is always encouraged). Localize the name if you’re utilizing fake personas: a Chinese audience is unlikely to respond to a testimonial from Jack Johnson.
Tie into local events if possible.
Mentioning local events and news demonstrates that you’re up to date on what’s going on in the local culture.
3. Watch Out for Cultural Insensitivity
Take into account the tone of your emails. In your area, strong-worded, boastful comments could be a sales asset. In another context, it could come across as aggressive and assertive. The simplest method to get it correct is to talk to editors and proofreaders about the tone of the email and how it will be received in the target culture.
In different civilizations, body language, colors, and symbols have diverse meanings. Make sure your emails convey the message you want to send to your recipients. Unfortunately, this is a mistake that is generally discovered after something appears to be wrong. So, if your audience analytics show an unusually low interaction rate, it’s possible you misunderstood cultural symbolism.
Work with an email localization expert that understands local culture and can provide you with sound advice. A localization expert should ideally reside in the country to which you’re conveying your message. An expat, for example, will be fluent in their native language but may have lost connection with their own culture if they haven’t lived in the nation for a long time.
4. Localization may be more important than translation
- If your target audience speaks your native tongue, it may be more cost-effective to invest your time and money in localizing rather than translating your email content.
- To further understand language fluency and preferences in your target region, do some research. This is something you can perform as a group and compare findings and outcomes.
- If you choose to translate your emails, make sure they are both localized and translated. Many marketers overlook this component of cultural adaptability, assuming that translation will suffice. If you don’t localize your emails, though, you’ll quickly find low interaction rates among consumers from other cultures.
5. Pay Special Attention to Subject Lines and Notification Text
Some languages have a higher level of verbosity than others. In some languages, what takes seven words and less than 40 characters can take much longer in others. This can cause problems with content that requires a lot of space, such as email subject lines and notification text.
It’s possible that you won’t be able to directly translate these goods. Instead, to avoid truncation, try drafting a fresh text that conveys the same information with the right number of words and characters.
6. Think About Technical Adoption And Resources
Depending on the technology and communication tools accessible to them, people use email in different ways. Different cultures, of course, have different attitudes about technology and human contact. Some countries are heavily reliant on digital technology, while others are wary of it.
Has your target audience predominantly shifted to mobile devices, or are they still primarily reading emails on computers? That makes a significant impact. You may simply get this information by looking at the data from your email campaign statistics.
There is a gap in internet availability in many countries around the world.
What is the state of internet connection in the nation you wish to visit?
Is it common to have a private, high-speed connection?
Are many of your recipients on dial-up or the public internet?
This has an impact on the content you send in your emails. When you’re targeting places with inadequate internet infrastructure, for example, high-resolution photographs, videos, and other email content that consumes a lot of bandwidth may not be a good choice.
If you’re unsure about the internet quality in your target country, use this list to discover how it compares to the global average in terms of internet speed.
Conclusion
To guarantee that your email content is appropriate to your target audience, you can use email localization design. You enhance your chances of enhancing engagement and conversions by sending email content that is relevant to your clients.
There are numerous nuances and subtleties to consider in order to ensure that your email is culturally appropriate for recipients from other countries. So, if you’re planning to use email campaigns to break into a new market, make sure you work with local specialists or invest time and resources to get it right.