Email marketing is nice. International email marketing is great!
But there are a few things that (suddenly) need a lot of extra attention.
Campaign Mails/automated emails:
Do you send out a birthday email for example? An automated campaign to give your customer a reduction on his birthday for example.
Don’t copy it automatically to all countries. In some Eastern European countries, birthday is not as celebrated like in western Europe. In the Czech Republic for example celebrating the so called “name day” is far more important. The same applies of course for public holidays or special events.
Deliverability:
Select an ESP (E-mail Marketing Service Provider) that guarantees you a good deliverability abroad and when there are problems with the deliverability, they should automatically detect it and take proper action. You can really lose a lot of money if you have a bad deliverability in certain countries. There are known cases where the deliverability of 98% to less than 60% declined. So that famous tent significant lost sales!
If you have a good ESP, They can contact the ISP’s to solve the problem.
Layout / Design:
Taking account of text lengths and differences. A Dutch phrase of four words, can be 10 words in French..
So take this in mind when designing a layout. Also you might want to think about special “header images” for each country.
In some countries and branches in these countries, you can test with a different ayout to ensure higher response rates. For example, in France, in contrast to the Netherlands, a very very busy (blinking and colourful) layout might be more productive.
Also the syntax for prices can differ per country. In Holland we use € 50 for fifty euro’s, in Belgium 50€ is more commonly used.
Translations:
Translation take a lot of time (and money). But is it necessary. Think not that an English text in Scandinavia will work because they speak so good English in general, or even that a word in Dutch can also be used in Belgium . This may in percentage conversion and CTR care.
Legal:
Legally, there are still big differences in Europe. In particular opt-in/out situations and it get’s more complicated with multi channel campaigns.
A good rule is to systems in such alway as:
Take the country with the strictest law’s and use that in the other ones also when necessary. In this way you will never be surprised with extra costs or short deadlines for legal changes.
Email marketing:
Choose a good e-mail marketing tool or provider. Make sure they can handle eastern European charactersets. Even if you don’t email to Eastern Europe at this moment. Who knows expansion is ahead. If you then need to change from ESP, it might be a big impact (think of databases, procedures etc.)
Local branches:
If there are local departments who translate or have local influence on the emails, arrange for a email marketing tool with a good rule management option in it.