Multilingual marketing emails

[rbharris1]

My organization serves clients in North America and South America. I want to be able to target marketing emails to recipients based on their language preferences.

I have created language variations my marketing email subscription types settings.

Also, I see in the email settings for each particular email that I can set a specific language for a specific marketing email.

However, I’m not sure I understand how these settings will affect email delivery.

Note that my issue is not the actual translation of the content. We can do that. My questions are these:

1. It looks like I can only build any given email in one language. Is that correct?
2. If a contact submits a subscription form using a Spanish language form variation, for instance, does HubSpot record that language preference?
3. If a contact is sent a specific marketing email in a langauge that is not his/her preferred langauge (e.g., the marketing email settings indicate that the language is English, but the contact subscribed using a Spanish variant of the subscription form), does that contact recieve the email?
4. What is the best approach to send differentiated content to recipients based on their language? A/B? Smart content?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @rbharris1,

The language you select in the settings tab of the marketing email affects the associated system pages, among other things the language that the unsubscribe / manage preferences link will be displayed it.

1. Correct, you would create two separate marketing emails if you want to address audiences in two languages.
2. No, not by default. My recommendation is to use hidden fields on your form to log the Preferred language. Pass contact property values with hidden form fields
3. The translations of your subscription types are really purely cosmetic. They don’t affect exclusion, suppression or preferences in any form. If someone subscribes through an English form and sees an English checkbox for a subscription type, that contact can be sent a Spanish email of the same subscription type.
4. A/B testing can be something that you play around in a second stage of setting up localized email marketing. In the beginning, I would simply create lists for each region you want to address and a separate marketing email. That would be by far the easiest way to start.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. I’m managing a lot of HubSpot portals which address international audiences in a variety of languages and segmentations.

Best regards!

[rbharris1]

So helpful. Thank you!