Improving international sales via email marketing is one of the very few places where your subscribers are ready and waiting to hear what you’ve got to say.
How do we know that?
They have given over one of the most valuable online possessions they have – their email address.
Nobody likes to receive spam or receive unwanted emails from third parties, so subscribers that have signed up to your mailing list have done so because they are interested in your business, that is the first thing to keep in mind.
Another positive to email marketing is that, unlike most social media channels, emails are viewed chronologically, so you won’t lose out on engagement due to unfavorable algorithms.
You can get your content directly into the inboxes of potential customers in a few easy steps.
What Does Email Marketing Mean for International Subscribers?
Well, the first hurdle has already been crossed – you have their email address, and that means you have their permission to contact them.
Great! And with email marketing, you can tailor your emails to your subscribers.
While you can (sort of) tailor your social media posts to your followers, email marketing allows you to speak to specific groups of people directly with highly targeted messaging without having to pay for ads.
But you can get even more specific than this, and we’re going to show you how email marketing can help in improving international sales by changing a few things about email marketing strategies.
Let’s take a look…
Start With the Right Tools
Investing in your marketing, like anything, takes time, so it’s worth having the right tools for the job.
You wouldn’t just pick any old accounting software to do your accounts, so your email marketing should be the same.
Marketing tools offer many features. The ones you want to look out for will be able to support auto-translation, email verification, contact segmentation, targeting, and scheduling.
Segmentation Provides Focus
Segmentation is the act of organizing your contacts by predefined categories, in this case you would segment your contacts by location/country, but if you wanted to be more focussed than that you can create groups by location and age, location and job type. It all depends on whom you want to target and why.
Does segmentation work? According to Mailchimp, Segmented email campaigns also earn 100.95% higher click-through rates as compared to non-segmented email campaigns.
So it’s fair to say that segmenting your contacts is a step that will provide actionable results.
Personalization Gives a Personal Touch
Once you have segmented your emails, you can begin to craft campaigns that are tailored to your different audiences.
You can do this by personalization. Personalization is when marketeers create campaigns that feature content, products, and offers specific to that audience.
A basic example might be, sending out coupons to your Chinese subscribers at Chinese New Year, making it an exclusive offer to those subscribers only.
In their 2014 study, Experian found that email personalization produces 6x higher revenue and transaction rates, this is because personalization makes people feel important.
In the context of international sales, personalization lets your international subscribers know that you care about them, not just as another email address on their list but as a person from another location.
Targeting Uses Real Data
Targeting and personalization may sound the same on the surface, however, targeting is based on data as well as consumer needs.
How does this work? Targeting is based on performance learning; taking data from previous campaigns and giving you insights into what works and what doesn’t, based on the actions of your subscribers.
For example, if you sent out a campaign to your British subscribers giving them free international shipping for Mother’s Day and on Father’s Day you gave them 20 percent off their orders but found that you received more orders for Mother’s Day than Father’s Day you might conclude that your British subscribers value free international shipping over a percentage off their order.
Translation Improves User Experience
Some email marketing apps like Mailchimp include an auto-translate option that allows your emails to be translated into 50 different languages.
These translations aren’t always spot on, however, giving your subscribers the option to view your emails in their own language goes a long way in terms of delivering a good user experience.
And remember, good UX is what increases your click-through rate, sales, and brand loyalty.
An alternative to using potentially low-quality automated translation is to hire a professional human translation service.
One of the greatest benefits of human translation is that translators take the cultural context of your target reader into account.
A Spanish translator specialized in European Spanish, for example, will have an intimate knowledge of Spain’s specific culture and will be able to apply this when translating your email content, thus improving international sales.
Scheduling Gets Your Emails Noticed
Scheduling is another action marketers can take to improve their user experience points.
Sending emails within the time zone of other countries is only a small thing, but can go a long way in terms of getting subscribers to open your emails.
On a practical level, if you send an email within your time zone that lands into a mailbox in the middle of the night in another time zone, that email is likely to get buried under other emails.
Sending your emails out at the right time puts you at the top of their mailbox at the time when your international contacts are more likely to check their emails, getting your emails noticed.
Watch Your International Sales Improve With Email Marketing
Keeping your international subscribers engaged with your emails might have seemed a daunting task, hopefully with our advice, you can take some practical steps towards changing your approach and increasing those international sales.
Working with a reliable translation service will be beneficial for your company’s international relations.
Whether you’re looking for marketing translators for your advertising campaigns or business translators for your documentation needs, BeTranslated has the right linguist for you.
Get in touch today for more information or a free, no-obligation quote.
