Email localization: 5 tips to localize your email marketing emails

Gone are the days when email marketing was just a novel and exciting way to market products and services to online audiences.

Today, it’s an essential part of a digital marketing strategy used by online businesses that have the highest return on investment (ROI) and allows reaching potential customers directly with personalized offers. 

No wonder businesses send more than 281 billion emails every day to their subscribers (by the way, this figure is projected to reach 347 billion by the end of 2023).

Well, you might also be among consumers who receive a lot of emails on a daily basis, so you know perfectly well that businesses like to use this communication channel to connect with their audiences.

You also know that the abundance of emails sent and received daily creates the need for more effective attention-grabbing techniques to ensure that content achieves maximum exposure.

One of these techniques is personalization or making the content relevant to the needs and interests of the customers. Localization is a major part of the personalization strategy because it ensures the maximum relevance of marketing offers to customers.

For example, your audience is much more likely to engage with an offer from a local store than an offer that comes from a store located in another area. 

Obviously, email marketing localization is much more complex than that, so if you want to know the ways in which you can adjust your email campaigns and make them as relevant as possible, check out the rest of the article.

Key Takeaways

• Relevance: Share offers that are locally relevant to your audience.
• Subject Line: Localize the subject line with specific area names to boost open rates.
• Contact Information: Include local business representatives' contact data in your emails.
• Translation: Translate email content into the recipient's local language.
• Time Zones: Consider recipients' time zones to send emails at optimal times.

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Share Locally Relevant Offers

This is exactly what we’ve just talked about. A customer is much more likely to engage with a business if it provides offers that are relevant to both their needs and location.

For example, let’s suppose you’re running a fitness chain represented in multiple states and you’re giving away discounts on an annual membership plan. 

Obviously, people living in other areas won’t benefit from this offer, so sharing this news with them isn’t exactly the best way to get a lot of conversions.

On the other hand, email subscribers who live in areas where your business has locations will be more than happy to hear about the new deal.

Recommended reading: Five email tips to save you time

Fashion brand H&M, for example, makes sure that they send only locally relevant offers by having the customers specify their country of residence and local postal code during the email subscription process on their website.

Here’s how a Danish retail chain Jysk uses localization by giving a £5 voucher to – you guessed it – UK-based subscribers for their subscription to the newsletter service. 

So, to sum up, make sure that your promotional offers are relevant to the recipient by following these tips:

• Send coupons that can be redeemed locally
• Don't send offers to areas/states/countries where you don't deliver
• Send offers on future events in specific locations for the recipients who have used your offers there before
• Share only relevant products, e.g. don’t try to sell snow boots to people who live in warm areas.

Localize the Subject Line

The subject line is the first thing that a recipient sees in the inbox, so it’s a critical tool for grabbing the attention early and encouraging them to open the message (in fact, 47 percent of email subscribers say they open emails based on the subject line). 

You can also localize your subject line by including the name of a specific area, city, or neighborhood to attract the attention of your subscribers and make your emails stand out in overfilled inboxes.

This technique is known to increase average open rates by 7 percent. 

Provide Contact Data of Local Business Representatives

Sending out locally relevant deals also requires you to ensure that your potential clients will have no problems taking advantage of them or getting additional information about them.

Fortunately, emails allow doing that with a signature.

There are two ways to go about this. First, you can use the standard signature provided by the email provider.

While it’s free and simple to get, it limits the opportunities for direct contact with the person who sent the email. 

The second way is to go with advanced email signature tools like Mailbutler that allow the creation of professional signatures including the photo of the sender, multiple phone numbers, a website, and social media profiles.

Mailbutler maximizes contact opportunities for your customers, so you can share the contact data of your local representatives with the subscribers.

Translate Your Copy

This one is obvious: if you’re promoting your products and services to international audiences, you have to localize your emails by translating the copy. English isn’t the only language out there, plus recent studies confirm the fact that local language is key to success in advertising. 

On top of that, it makes perfect sense to provide your potential customers with access to content in their native language because it would be much more useful for them to make a good purchase decision.

When localizing content, it’s critical to work with professional translators and native speakers.

To automate your email marketing for international audiences, using copy templates for different languages is also necessary.

➡️Use Mailbutler's Email Templates to easily tailor emails for international audiences

Take Time Difference into Account

Marketers have been struggling with defining the best time to send promotional emails. Numerous studies were carried out to identify the email-checking habits of different groups of customers in different countries, but the results aren’t exactly what the researchers were hoping for.

This is to say that there’s no universal formula for achieving the maximum open rate that businesses can use to identify the best time to send emails.

However, we still can use the results from these studies as a starting point for your new, localized email marketing campaign. 

For example, here’s the summary of 14 studies on the best day and time to send promotional emails, as described by CoSchedule:

The best times to send emails are...

• 10 am. The most popular time explained by the fact that people check their mail a lot in the morning
• 8 pm. A lot of email users check it before going to bed
• 2 pm. This is explained by the fact that people like to check email during lunch
• 6 am. This may sound surprising but a lot of people begin their day by emailing in bed. 

Relevance is Paramount

Customers want relevant, personalized, and interesting offers, and localization is a big part of ensuring that your business delivers that.

As you can see, it requires you to take a holistic approach to localization, but it’s the best way to build a large base of customers looking forward to receiving promotions from your business. 

Remember: localization is tremendously important to make it easy for your customers to engage with your company, so hopefully these tips will be useful for you to make it happen in an effective and efficient way. 

Make sure to also check out our Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing Comparison. 

Email localization FAQs

What is localization strategy in marketing?

A localization strategy is a way in which a company or organization adjusts its marketing efforts to a particular country, state, city, culture, and/or language.

Localization is a key part of personalizing individual email messages and entire email marketing campaigns.

What can help you implement localization in your email marketing?

To be able to implement localization in your email marketing, you need to ask your current and potential customers to specify their country of residence and write their local postal code when signing up for your email newsletters on your website.

With the help of these pieces of information, you’ll be able to:

• Send locally relevant offers (discounts, coupons, free gifts, etc.)
• Localize your email subject lines
• Share contact details of your local business representatives
• Translate your email copy in relevant languages
• Take your recipients’ time zones into account when determining when to click ‘send’

What is a localization of an email?

Email localization is the process of making your email content relevant to local languages and cultures.

The goal of email localization is to reach and win new customers as well as boost sales.

Despite what many people think, email localization is about so much more than simple copy translation. It includes:

• Localizing subject lines and CTAs (using words that your target audiences understand and accept)
• Familiarizing yourself with local email regulations
• Using neutral images to avoid negative reactions from readers from certain countries
• Accounting for time differences when sending email messages