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JEENI TALKS April 2014 / Article

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,

we want to focus particularly on multicultural marketing as a frame for

multilingual email marketing, one of the core services of Jeeni.net.

To us, writing about multilingual email marketing it is not only a matter of

offering you good tips [hopefully] for your email marketing campaigns, but 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.

AT A GLANCE

JEENI TALKS introduces

interesting content on email

and mobile marketing by using

visually appealing designs and

insightful short articles which

highlight relevant aspects and

ease the reading process.

This JENNI TALKS’s article

focuses on starting up the

conversation about multilingual

email marketing, emphasizing

the need of building a frame in

which the topic rests safe and

from where it can deploy its

whole potential.

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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 to you in your language and understanding

what you may expect from me based on both your personal and, of course,

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 are an excellent vehicle for spreading content. Some people say “email

marketing is not effective anymore” or “it’s dead” or, even if it is still a soldier

in the online battle camp, social networks are not its friends and are going to

defeat it. Nothing is more wrong. Emails and social networks are great teammates: the first is the “means”; the second is

the “commodity”. Even more, emails are themselves, potential carriers of great content. However, a well-designed

multilingual email and content marketing strategy must be carried out. 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.

A WELL-DESIGNED MULTILINGUAL

CONTENT AND EMAIL MARKETING

STRATEGY

What we meant with that is basically planning. And

planning is translated to objectives, capabilities,

resources and time. Whatever campaign your enterprise

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 developing an

effective multilingual marketing campaign, we suggest

you to give a glance, primarily, to your team. Does it

have the capabilities to conduct multilingual marketing

campaigns? Not only ask yourself about 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). Now, think of the

market you want to knock the door or that 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 and

A transcreation is an article written about the same

topic and using the same structure as well as some of

the facts of an article in a source language, but localized

and adapted to the culture of your business prospects.

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convince that 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 that the targeted

multilingual groups may have.

We are planning further writing about all the topics

mentioned above in our coming articles, as well as

offering you some advices for your multilingual email

marketing campaigns based on our own day-by-day, on

experts' opinions and on other companies’ experience.

Nevertheless we considered really important to frame

“the multilingual fact” in marketing as a starting point.

Now we know it essentially starts up with ethnicities or

languages but, ultimately, it is about understanding

those - sometimes - alien customs and ways of thinking

of people we haven’t commonly meet in our lives to

make them more familiar to us and to talk to them more

frankly, intelligently and straightforward in order to

offer them valuable product and services and to grow our

business.

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