International companies, as well as companies working in multilingual markets, such as Switzerland, must communicate with users in different languages in their email marketing. No matter whether the content of the marketing messages is adapted to the individual target markets or whether a standardised communication strategy is followed: every additional language increases the complexity of email marketing communication and all processes related to it. The optimisation of these processes for more efficiency is an important task for digital marketing in the area of “Operative Processes”.
A typical example in email marketing: A newsletter with five articles is to be sent in three different languages. The newsletter is centrally created, the persons in charge supply the content from the three target markets: 15 different content fragments for one newsletter sending. Each amendment to an article must be processed separately and the adapted newsletter must be released centrally, as well as by the person responsible in each target market. This means a lengthy adaptation and adjustment process, which gains complexity with each further language. In practice, there will probably be even more players, who need to be included: Several content suppliers per target market, who must allow clearing in case of changes. Agencies. Translators. Copy writers, graphic artists and designers. And in the worst (but unfortunately common!) case, all these players communicate their amend requests in a different way, often through word briefings via mailing list to all participants. When the newsletter is ready for sending, its content will have run through a highly complex and often little efficient net of processes and players. This means time, ties up resources and threatens the success of the communication due to increased susceptibility to errors.
Value Increase Through Technically Supported Content Processing
In order to create the processing of multilingual content from a variety of sources more efficiently, we need the specific technical support of the relevant processes. This must be controlled by Marketing and the processes should be simple enough, so that all parties involved can collect, process and release content without technical know-how or additional expenses.
One approach here is the use of Excel sheets (e.g. the CamapignSheets of artegic’s ELAINE FIVE technology), which are automatically created depending on the content demand, completed by the individual information carrier and then imported into the processing email marketing systems (not manually cell by cell but automatically!). This means, with each amend, only the relevant content on the Excel sheet needs to be changed. The manual editing of the newsletter can be omitted. Dedicated workflows via content management systems or collaboration systems are also an option. Important is the central management of a decentralised (partially) automated collection of content and not the central manual copying of texts. This will enable you to capture and import content in a quick and easy way. The clearing process can be directly displayed in the email marketing software.
Free Whitepaper: 7 Digital Marketing Trends 2015
Content processing is only one of the important trends in digital marketing in the following years. Further trends can be found in our free whitepaper 7 Digital Marketing Trends 2015