International Sends Best Practices

Know Your Subscribers

You have a better chance to connect with your subscriber when you send specific, targeted, and relevant emails. Consider how you can build relationships with your subscriber so that you can send the "right" email.

Send Email in the Subscriber's Native Language

Your message is best communicated in the recipient's native language. In almost all situations, open rates, click rates, and conversion rates are highest for these emails. Use your subscribers' language preferences.

Investigate your subscriber base by thinking about these questions. Where did your lists come from? Where are your subscribers located? What can you assume about their language preferences?

It can be faster to ask the subscribers directly. Use Surveys to Learn Each Subscriber's Language Preference.

Consider sending a survey to your subscribers to discover their preferred language. Make the survey as simple as possible; we recommend a single question with a list of radio-button language options for them to select. You can design the survey to populate their answers into the desired attribute fields.

Segment Your Lists Based on Language Preference

After you have your subscribers' language preference as an attribute, you can segment your lists into groups based on language. You can use these groups to send emails in the specified language to each group of subscribers. For example, send Japanese emails only to subscribers who prefer Japanese.

Use this task to create a group based on an attribute:

• Click the Subscribers tab from the navigation bar.
• Click my groups.
• To start the wizard, click Create Group from the toolbar and click Next.
• Select Build a rule based on profiles and preferences and click Next.
• Complete the Build Rule page and click Next.
• Specify the name of the group and where it resides then click Create. If necessary, create a subscriber group folder by clicking New, then click OK.
• Click Finish.

Create and Send a Separate Email Specific to Each Encoding

Each email you create can use only one language encoding, for example, Japanese or Chinese but not both. Ensure that your emails and groups are designed so that your emails are sent only to subscribers in geographical areas where they are likely to accept the assigned encoding.

When you send an email, the application creates an email header. The email header contains the From information (name and email address), To information, date the email was sent, subject line of the message, and other information relating to the send. The email header is encoded with the same character encoding you use for the body of the email. If you can, use email header information that is in the same language as the body of the email. Create a language-specific subject line and different sender profile for each language to better ensure that your email header displays correctly.

Note

We do not recommend using non-ASCII characters in your From information and subject line for emails sent using the send wizard.

Example

Send product information to subscribers in the U.S. and Japan. The email you've designed has marketing information in English and technical specifications in Japanese. When you test your email with Unicode encoding, your Japanese testers can't see the Japanese characters. When you test your email with Japanese encoding, your U.S. testers have trouble reading the email because foreign encoded emails look like spam in the U.S.

So, you redesign the email into two emails: one in English, another in Japanese. Each email is encoding uniquely and sent to the appropriate subscribers. Everyone receives what they need and can easily read all the text.

Create Different Content Headers and Footers for Each Language

Make the content header and footer sections reflect what you know about your subscriber.

We recommend that you create language-specific content headers and footers for all your international emails. You can manage these headers in the following ways:

• If you create a send definition for your email sends, you can choose the content header and footer to use as part of the Delivery Profile.
• You can use the HTML Paste method to create your emails, which bypass automatic content headers and footers.
• You can use space in your template to put content header and footer text directly into your templated email.

Note

Not all non-ASCII characters are supported in footers, such as double-byte characters like Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Russian. In these instances, choose an option which allows you to include the text within the body of the email.

Working with Non-ASCII Characters

You can find new challenges when trying to create email content in a different language. If you can’t create your content by typing in the foreign characters, copy and paste the foreign language characters directly into the email message body.

Cutting and Pasting

You can be provided any needed non-English text from an external source, such as your marketing team. In that situation, you can simply cut the text from your source and paste it into your email content areas.

To minimize possible character corruption, we suggest that you do not edit your foreign language text within the editor. Instead:

• Keep a separate text copy, saving it with UTF-8 encoding.
• Edit your copy in a text editor.
• Save changes on your computer under a different name each time.
• Paste the edited copy directly in the editor.

Change Keyboard Settings

When your desired language is not supported within standard ASCII character set, change your keyboard layout so you can type in another character set. However, this technique requires more software outside what the editor can provide or support. Once you have the required software, refer to the purchased software manuals and your computer's system manual to learn how to configure and use these tools.

Encourage Recipients to View as a Web Page

We recommend that you encourage your subscribers to View as a Web Page. Most of the concerns and issues with email rending via language encoding disappear when viewing the content via an Internet browser.

We recommend that you always provide the standard “Click here to view as a web page” link in your emails. We also recommend that you include more links in the body of the email and that you actively mention and encourage use of those links. An example can be phrased like, "If you experience any problems viewing this email, click this link to be taken to a web version."

Learn and Follow International Spam laws

Email Studio is designed to help you comply with U.S. spam laws. We believe in our business practices and believe that they are valid around the world. However, we cannot guarantee that our system, emails, or business practices are legal in other countries. We strongly recommend that you seek legal counsel on a country by country basis.