This article gives you an introduction to the VCE multi-language email campaign creation feature.
The VCE multi-language campaign creation feature is in open pilot phase.
If you have any questions or feedback or you need more details of this feature contact your Success Manager.
What is a multi-language email campaign?
With the multi-language feature in the Visual Content Editor (VCE) you can create email campaigns in various languages and send them to your recipients all over the world. This feature enables you to manage all the language versions of your emails in one campaign, resulting in simplified automated programs. Multi-language email feature is available in the VCE only.
Why is it good for you?
The multi-language feature helps you enhance your marketing campaign performance. From now on you can reach all your contacts in their own languages.
You can add languages to the email campaigns and templates, so your contacts will receive their appropriate language version based on their language preference. You can define the language versions according to the IETF language standard to localize your email campaigns.
Before you start creating multi-language email campaigns
There are a few prerequisites that you should fulfill before creating language versions in the email campaign.
Define your language preferences
As a prerequisite, you need to determine the language versions of your contacts under the menu: Contacts > Contact Lists. The multi-language feature uses an IETF language standard to localize the email campaigns.
You can add your language preference, as follows:
- Edit your new or your existing contact list. For details, see Managing contact lists.
- Click Edit.
- Select the Other tab.
- In the IETF language tag field add your languages with language codes in either of the following ways:
- Add a two-letter language code only. E.g.: “en” for English, “de” for German, etc.
- Add a two-letter language code followed by a two-letter country code. E.g.: “en-US” for English (United States), “en-GB” for English (Great Britain)
IETF language codes are always case-sensitive. Languages must be written lowercase, while the territory codes need to be uppercase, e.g.: "en" OR "en-US" are both ok.
Migrate your language data
Sync your language data. For information, see Setting up an auto-import.
Should you have any data migration-related questions, feel free to contact Emarsys support for further help.
How does it work?
To add new languages to your existing email campaign or create a new with the multi-language feature open Visual Content Editor (VCE) and go to the Content Creation page.
Email basics tab
On the Email basics tab you can define language-, and locale-specific attributes for each language versions of your email campaigns:
- Subject line
- From (name)
- From (email address)
Languages tab: Creating language versions
Note that, this is one campaign now, however each language version can have its own design, layout and content. For previewing and testing the different language versions you can select any one of the contacts in your database and see exactly how your email will look. For more information, see Contact preview.
Changing the master language
The master language represents the fallback language of your campaign. For example, a contact in your database has "fr" as her main language and you send your email campaign in "de", "en-US", and "es", then none of these languages match your contact's language preference. In this case the tool automatically reverts to the master language.
On the Languages tab click Change Master Language and select the new master language from the drop-down list.
Localizing a template with e-language tags
If you have a content that you do not want to update all the time on a campaign level you can insert this code in the template. This way you can avoid translating it every time you use this template.
In the template, wrap the language-specific content (typically the header and the footer) and add the locale tags to it:
<e-language locales ="en-US">
WOMEN
<e-language>
<e-language locales ="de, de-DE, de-AT, de-CH">
DAMEN
<e-language>For more information, see Working with email templates.
IETF language tags are always case-sensitive.
Using the Translator role
Let's say you are hiring translators to create multiple-language content for your email campaign. In this case, it could be useful, if you assign limited permission level exclusively for translators. For details, see Setting up the translator role.
Limitations
Note the following limitations and known issues:
Unsubscribe and online version links
- On the Email Basics tab the built-in unsubscribe and online version links do not adapt to various languages, they will use the selected language only.
For a workaround to solve this, use the#HTML_BROWSE_HREF#and#UNSUBSCRIBE_HREF#placeholders in the campaign.
Custom add-ons
- Custom add-ons (e.g.: Product Search) might not work with multi-language email campaigns .
Reporting
- Language-specific performance of the email campaign can only be seen for individual links in reporting.
- Also, please bear in mind that Visual link tracking shows an aggregate report on built-in unsubscribe link and online version link clicks irrespectively of the languages. All other links are displayed based on the master language’s clicks only.
