Enabler provide best practice advice around creating optimised calls to action within B2B and B2C email marketing communications.

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Did you know that more than 70% of the world’s internet users are not native English speakers? Or that 85% of internet users don’t purchase products unless the descriptions are provided for them in their native language? With statistics like these, it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re not only segmenting your emails properly but also making sure your customers receive your emails in a way they can digest.

It can seem daunting to think about getting the same campaign right in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Chinese, but it’s important to get your head around how to do this and how to do it effectively – especially as studies have shown that it can have a direct impact upon ROI. Luckily, we’re here to help!

Adapting your email campaigns to accommodate different languages is just another way of making your emails accessible to your customers. The time and effort you put into making sure that your emails are mobile responsive and your CTA’s are clearly visible should be no different to the time you spend making sure your customers can read your emails… and that they make sense. It’s not simply a case of having a translator translate the emails word for word. You also have to consider how that would read back to someone who not only uses a different language but comes from a different culture to you.

Here’s an example. In this campaign, Ralph Lauren had to adapt the copy ‘CHRISTMAS EXPERIENCE’ in the English version into several different languages, including Turkish. Here is the top banner of the Turkish version.

You’ll see that they have used the word ‘KIŞ’ which means ‘Winter’. This is because Turkey is not a Christian country. What Ralph Lauren have done here is not only translated their email into the relevant language for the country it’s being sent to, but have also made it culturally relevant to the customers receiving it.

A key thing that Ralph Lauren did here was ask the question you should all be asking when marketing to a new country: ‘will they get it’? You need to ask this question no matter what area of marketing you’re in. What should the people in your emails be wearing that’s culturally relevant? What sort of language should you be using? What events should you be promoting? Not only this, but you’ll have to do it all whilst promoting the same product. So how can you approach this?

The first thing to do is look at managing your data. If you’ve already segmented your subscribers by language or country – great job, you’re halfway there! If not, you’ll need to focus on campaigns which survey your customers (for example, by using a simple preference centre) before you start sending localised campaigns. Having said this, there are ways to send localised campaigns without having perfect data lists.

Check out this campaign from Global Eyes Production. They used a GIF as the hero image of their campaign which scrolls through the different language options. It’s a simple message with the call to action to click on their language preference. This subsequently took the customer to a form where they could update their language preference.

The next thing to think about is exactly what content you’re going to have in your emails – specifically the copy. When translating from English to many other language s, you’ll find the amount of characters required in languages such as Spanish far surpass the requirement for the English language. This means you’ll need to keep an eye on the length of your subject lines and pre-headers, as well as the overall design and content length of your emails.

This also applies to CTAs. A call to action like ‘find an outlet store’ is short enough in English but in Spanish this becomes ‘Buscar una tienda outlet.’ Of course, you can always go down the route of using different copy for different languages.
You may also find you run into problems with character encoding. If you try and put an e acute (é) into HTML, it will often throw an error at you. There are a number of ways to get around this. Firstly, make sure you’re using UTF-8 character encoding where possible, and also make sure you’re using the correct codes for special characters.

Time zones are also something to bear in mind when sending worldwide emails. Just as working days in China won’t be the same as working days in the UK for obvious reasons, even countries in the EU can be a problem. Consider the Spanish working day, there’s usually a siesta break in the afternoon, so it’s always useful to consider this sort of information. Asking a native usually helps!

It’s also important to understand the legal side of sending. Laws around data and when you can and can’t send to customers vary in different countries . For example, in the US there’s the CAN-SPAM Act which will provide you with guidelines on when you can and can’t send. In Canada there’s the CASL, which is more strict on opt-in consent than other countries. The EU deals primarily with only emailing subscribers with which you hold an existing business relationship. Australia has a Spam Act, and China is definitely one to watch as it’s incredibly strict – especially when it comes to subject lines. It’s definitely worth looking into the laws of anywhere you’re planning on sending to before you do.

Finally, if you’re going to attempt any sort of email marketing strategy involving localisation, I implore you to make sure it runs through the rest of your marketing. For example, there’s nothing more frustrating than receiving an email in your native language, then clicking through to find a landing page that’s only in English.

Overall, localising your emails can be of great value to both you and your customers. Even just taking steps towards localising your emails can help you build richer data on your customers. This is a win-win situation for everyone. Customers will receive more targeted and relevant emails and this should, in turn, boost your results. So, if you’re going to attempt localisation in your emails remember to be legal, content clever, have a great translator, and be really consistent with the overall customer journey. Ciao!

Email is an excellent way of communicating with your customers and there are always ways to improve interaction. You may have heard the terms ‘AB testing’, ‘split testing’ or ‘multi-variant testing’ being batted around in the marketing world but what is it… and why should you be doing it?

A/B testing is taking two (or more) versions of something and displaying these different versions to selections of users to determine which one works better. The term can be used for many areas of marketing but I’m going to focus on email. With email testing, we look at open rates and click through rates to determine which variant of the email has performed the best.

Well-planned A/B testing can make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your campaigns.

It’s important to test because no database is the same as another and you can’t just rely on research by others and apply it to your own campaigns. Even within industries, there can be huge discrepancies between what works for one company and what works for another.

 

The first thing to do when planning an A/B test is to figure out exactly what you’re trying to improve. Are you looking to improve your open rates or click through rates? Are you trying to work out what type of email best suits your audience or are you testing content? Whatever you’re looking to improve, there’s a test for it. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

 

Subject line

This is one of the first tests I’d recommend running. It’s really effective for boosting open rates. You can try testing anything from the length of the subject line, to using your customer’s names, to referring to the offer in the email. Whatever you do, remember to make them different enough to notice an effect. The great thing with subject lines is that you can test multiple subject lines at once. I’ve run campaigns where we’ve tested up to 10 subject lines in one go!

Subheader

This is the first piece of text within the email template and sometimes also displays alongside the subject line in the recipient’s inbox, depending on the email client. If the first text in your template is ‘Click her to view this email online’ you’re missing out on an additional opportunity to get your message across to your audience.

Headline

As one of the first parts of your email the customer sees, this is a pretty good section to test. You can try posing a question or relating the headline copy to the rest of the email – it’s up to you.

Call to action

This is another section of your email to really dedicate some testing time to. It’s the part of the email which can determine whether your customer takes the action you want. You can test creative look and feel, or the copy itself.

Personalisation

Are you going to use your customers name within the email? How about relevant information? For example, if you work in the insurance industry you might include a policy number or the name of their pet (but maybe only do the pet one if you specialise in pet insurance, otherwise you’re headed down the stalker route!). Personalising an email can help engage your customers. This doesn’t work for all email recipients, which is why it’s perfect for testing. Read our blog on personalisation for more tips and ideas on this subject.

Creative

The layout of your email is one aspect with which you can have endless hours of testing fun. You may decide you want to put different sections of your emails in different places to see what gets more traction from this alternative placement in the design.

Testimonials

This is fairly simple. If you’ve got the testimonials to back up your product, why not try them out to see if they boost engagement?

Time of day

Timing is another effective variable to test. I’ve seen this have more impact with B2B than B2C databases, due to the flow of the work day. For example, some people prefer to check their emails on their commute or during their lunch break but are more likely to interact with them towards the end of the work day on the commute home. However, you may find that your B2C database prefers morning sends to afternoon sends, or vice versa. Either way, it’s an easy and effective aspect to test.

Imagery

Imagery is one of my favourite elements to test, mainly because it’s really interesting to see if customers are affected by imagery. If you have a picture of your product in there, how do users react to it? You can also test placement and quantity of imagery.

Amount of content

Content testing works especially well for blog based emails or newsletters. Providing customers with too many articles can cause a paradox. If there’s too much choice, to the point where the user feels overwhelmed, they may not take any action. However, in other databases you might find that the more content you include in these emails, the more click throughs you get.

Wording of offers

Choice of wording can be applied to almost any area in an email but the one I’ve seen work the best is copy surrounding discounts. Some customers may respond to ‘50% off’, whereas others may prefer seeing ‘£20 off’. How you word your offers can have a big impact on the click through rate, so this is an important consideration for those of you running promotional emails.

Overview

The key thing to remember when selecting a test is to make sure you only do one test at a time. In order to determine what has had the impact on your interaction lift, you need to know exactly what it was that worked. If you try testing subject lines and creatives at the same time, it’s very difficult to pinpoint exactly what made the difference and if one test affected the outcome of another.

The second thing you should do is work out who you are going to test on. As general best practice, I’d always test on a statistically relevant percentage of your data and then roll out the winning result to the rest. This ensures you are exposing the majority of your customers to the winning version.

Thirdly, make sure you’re always keeping a record of the tests you have run and what the outcome was. You can then use these findings, and apply them to subsequent campaigns. Having said this, if you find something that works don’t just stop testing that element. For example, if you find a particular style of subject line that engages your audience don’t just assume this will work for your customers forever.

Imagine you got the same style of subject line for all the emails you received in the next three months ‘Andrew, check out these new offers’…. over and over again. You’d get bored, we all would. When email subscribers get bored, they stop interacting. We call this having ‘list fatigue’ and it happens when brands tactics have gone stale. To ensure this doesn’t happen to you, make sure you keep on testing and trying out new things to keep your subscribers interested.

You may find several elements that work really well for you and you can keep these on rotation to use when the previous formula stops working.

A/B testing is such an interesting area of email marketing. It’s a chance to get creative with your emails and really get to know your customers, finding out what makes them tick and improving your results at the same time. I hope you have fun testing your emails and that you boost your campaigns as a result.  And as always, if you have any questions about this subject or what we do here at Enabler, get in touch.