Localise and Succeed With the Right Email Translation Services
In today’s business landscape (that is, a fully globalised one), effective communication is paramount for companies seeking to extend their reach across borders. And that’s why email translation services are crucial in knocking down some barriers along the way.
Just to mention a fact, it’s estimated that 4.37 billion people currently use email. This can translate into the number of individuals your marketing campaign could reach. And while it doesn’t mean that all of them will jump on it, it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.
As you can see, email marketing remains a powerful tool for reaching a wide audience. However, it isn’t enough to simply send a message; you should carefully adapt the content to the new languages to ensure compliance and engagement.
And the same goes for managing a global workforce: If you have a multicultural team, your messages will do a much better job if they speak the language of your team members and fit their cultural expectations.
In this article, we’ll shine a spotlight on the matter, so you can learn about the benefits, pitfalls, and more.
Translation and Localisation: What’s the difference?
Translation and localisation are often interpreted as synonyms and although both stand for linguistic solutions, they aren’t the same thing.
While translation focuses on converting text from one language to another, localisation goes beyond that. It involves adapting content to suit the cultural, linguistic, and regional preferences of the target audience—to foster improved intercultural communications.
Localisation is about more than just words—it encompasses how to communicate better with specific markets. It considers cultural nuances, idioms, date and time formats, currency, and even design elements. By incorporating these elements into email content, businesses can ensure that their messages are more than just understood: They feel familiar and close, and this is perfect to engage.
Translation, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with maintaining accuracy. In other words, it focuses more on linguistic preciseness and fidelity to the source text, than on cultural adaptation.
#OptimationalTip: For certain content, translation is a suitable approach, whereas, for others, localisation is better. So, analyse what you want to achieve with your messages and the information they include. If in doubt, ask your language partner to help you shed some light on the subject.
Learn more about the differences between translation and localisation.
Email Translation Services: 5 Benefits of Email Localisation
Now let’s talk about the most incredible part: The benefits. But not any types of benefits, but the ones you’ll get after going through the localisation of your emails. All this bearing in mind that translation is, in itself, an aspect of localisation.
By adapting email content to specific regions and cultures, your company can unlock the following advantages.
Improved Engagement and UX
Localisation enables businesses to deliver emails that resonate with their recipients, improving customer engagement and a more positive communication experience.
And this applies from start to finish: It’s not merely localising the email text, but also everything that makes up the whole experience. That is, if your email has links that lead to a certain page, it must also be in the language of your audience. Let’s say that you’re suggesting a resource, sharing a piece of news, or promoting a new event: Wherever the link takes them, the end of the journey should be in their native tongue.
By speaking the way your recipient speaks, you can foster a stronger connection; that’s something you’ll definitely want to do, whether you’re communicating with your team, a prospect or a long-term client.
Enhanced Brand Perception and Trust
Localised emails can help you demonstrate your company’s commitment to understanding and serving your diverse customer base. This attention to cultural and linguistic nuances helps you build a positive brand image and fosters trust and loyalty among your international customers and workforce.
Let’s take a sales multilingual email campaign as an example. You’re contacting current customers from around the world, knowing that they speak different languages and have different customs and habits. To make the content feel tailor-made and make your clients feel special, you localise the payout currencies and the expiry date format of the promotions; you even add puns to match the slang of each country. Sounds more interesting than a standardised message, doesn’t it?
#OptimationalTip: With email localisation, you’ll make your audience feel that you care about their understanding and feelings towards the reading journey. I.e., your brand is empathetic. And ultimately, this will boost trust, credibility, and a positive perception of your company.
Reduced Resource Requirements With Email Translation Services
Imagine a customer who receives an email they don’t fully understand. They may need to call your company’s customer service to ask for clarification, drawing out and complicating the process unnecessarily. Moreover, this can have a potentially negative impact on their perception of your brand.
Similarly, if the email goes to your global workforce, ambiguous or hard-to-understand content can lead to people reaching out to HR or starting never-ending email threads with their leadership or colleagues. In turn, this can compromise job effectiveness, deadline compliance, etc. It can also impact their willingness to keep working for the company.
In both situations, it’ll affect your resources. In the first scenario, you’ll need to spend more budget on customer service and loyalty campaigns. For the second, you’ll have to invest in employee retention programmes and, in the worst case, in training new talent.
Expanded Global Reach
This is fairly obvious, but worth mentioning. Localisation services allow you to communicate with more people, regardless of distance, cultural differences, or however other barriers there may be in between. By localising emails, your business can effectively penetrate new markets and expand its prospect/customer portfolio.
The same goes for hiring and working with foreign talent! Imagine you can set up a team with all the skills and values you want them to have; features that can match your brand’s vision and can help it grow. A team of professionals who are sometimes easy to spot, but who aren’t always in the same place (especially with the current digital nomadic trends.)
However, this utopia is more than achievable with the translation of your assets, especially those relating to seamless and effective communication.
Find out the advantages of building a global team.
#OptimationalTip: Customising content to resonate with local customers increases the likelihood of attracting and retaining a diverse audience, opening doors to new opportunities.
Better Analytics Results
In a global strategy, it’s key to measure content performance to know what works and what needs to be improved. And there’s no denying the satisfaction we get when we see positive metrics. With the right email translation services, i.e., localisation where relevant, you can get happier analytics.
That is, by producing catchier content that has improved readability and adapts to readers’ forms, they’ll be more enticed to read it—from the subject line to the very end. What’s more, it’s easier for you to get them to do what you’re expecting them to do, as even the calls to action will be more effective.
In short, you’ll see improved rates of open, click-through, conversion, and more.
Localisation has all this to offer and much more, as it’s also a great tool to increase your website’s organic traffic.
Potential Risks of Not Localising Emails
After what we’ve already discussed, the drawbacks of neglecting localisation (or doing it poorly) become crystal clear. Let’s list the most common and relevant ones.
- Misunderstandings: Without relying on professional email translation services, sending a message in a language that recipients don’t understand would easily result in misinterpretation. And this can lead to confusion, frustration, and potential loss of business opportunities.
- Cultural Insensitivity: Failure to adapt email content to cultural norms can lead to unintentional cultural insensitivity—and this is dreadfully bad. A poor translation or lack of localisation can deliver a text that offends your recipients and damage your reputation, hindering future business or collaboration relationships.
- Reduced Engagement and Conversion: Generic, non-localised emails may fail to resonate with recipients, resulting in lower engagement levels and reduced conversion rates. Lack of personalisation and relevance can make emails appear like “copy and paste,” leading to disengagement from the target audience.
- Negative Brand Perception: In international business communication, brand reputation is everything. Therefore, if you simply send generic emails, your audience may perceive your company as indifferent or uninterested in their needs. This can undermine your company’s image and trust, potentially resulting in the loss of existing customers and valuable workforce.
- Missed Opportunities: How do you expect to connect with foreign markets, if not by speaking their language? Without localisation, your businesses may miss out on opportunities to connect with international prospects effectively, which can make them choose your competitors.
Interested in learning about the pitfalls? Then read more about the most common mistakes in translation.
Email Translation Services Under the Spotlight: Good and Bad Examples
Here are two examples: One of well-done email localisation and another of a poorly executed campaign—to highlight the importance of getting it done the right way by professionals.
What You Should Do
A company—let’s call it “X”—is a global e-commerce platform that focuses on the importance of localising its communications. They know that to expand into new markets successfully, they should adapt all their content to each region’s cultural and linguistic nuances.
That is why the emails they send to their prospects in the UK are slightly different from those they send to the US, even though the language is the same. They also come up with multilingual email campaigns to address their audiences from other countries.
To do this well, they study local customs and preferences beforehand, so they can be sure to incorporate relevant information about specific offers. For example, they cite local influencers, promote best-selling products from each specific area, and employ trendy idioms. They also include local currencies and measurement systems and provide specific information about shipping methods, etc.
By personalising its emails, company X creates a connection with its audience, which results in higher engagement and increased conversion rates.
What You Shouldn’t Do
Company “Y”, a fashion retailer that wants to expand into new markets, thought that the answer to how to communicate better in a global marketplace was via an international language. So, they resorted to U.S. English as their go-to way. However, because of this somewhat generic decision, their content isn’t appealing outside that country.
They sent an email campaign to all their global customers without considering two important factors. First, not everyone speaks English or prefers it when shopping. Second, even if they speak fluently, there are cultural differences that can blur communication.
The message contained references to an event that’s only relevant to the U.S. readership (i.e., Thanksgiving Day.) While this is a familiar day for many, it isn’t relevant to everybody; therefore, it caused confusion and disconnection with the brand, as some people interpreted that there was an error and perhaps the message wasn’t intended for them. Others didn’t even open the email, as the subject line didn’t ring a bell, and it went straight to the spam folder.
#OptimationalTip: The lack of cultural understanding can undermine the effectiveness of a message and damage your brand’s reputation in foreign markets. Professional email translation services are ultimately aimed at preventing intercultural communication mishaps.
In terms of best practices for cross-border teams, don’t miss these tips for fostering healthy multiculturalism in the workplace.
Wrapping Up: For a Global Strategy, a Localised Approach
Communication is paramount for the success of any company, and when operating in a globally diverse landscape, it becomes even more critical. By embracing localisation and delivering messages that really mean something to your audiences across different backgrounds, you can foster trust, engagement, and long-term business relationships on a global scale.
Therefore, understanding that the right email translation services should use a localisation approach, where most appropriate (and convenient), gives you a clue as to what to look for when searching for a language partner. The advantages of a localised strategy are simply superb, but the risks of not adapting your content are too daunting to overlook.
If you’re ready to make your email content reach seamlessly new destinations, contact us today.