I recently spent a day and a half in Munich, Germany, taking part in the MarketingSherpa Email Summit and leading an optimization workshop.
The event brought together a diverse panel of presenters with very interesting case studies. Although the majority of attendees were, of course, from Germany, I also had the opportunity to meet marketers from France, Spain, and the UK.
For the most part, I found that European marketers face similar challenges as we do in the US, such as increasing their house list, improving the registration process, and optimizing their welcome email series.
However, I would say that two of the most popular topics of the event were multi-language campaigns and relevant content.
The importance of relevance (Relevanz, pertinence, pertinencia)
European marketers have the good fortune of access to many diverse countries in which to expand their markets, but these diverse markets are also a daily challenge. To remain competitive, these marketers need to consider localizing their campaigns in at least four of the EU’s top languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. And, as if they haven’t enough to do, they really ought to consider Italian or Portuguese.
It is not enough to just have a good database program or the technical capability to manage multiple languages. Among the many cases presented, success stories came from those that had a multi-language team that proofread and localized content. Even better off were the folks who had a multilingual, multicultural team (sort of a polyglot SWAT unit, if you know what I mean) to adjust campaigns to customers’ specific needs by country.
One interesting case presented by Avid Agency showed significant increases in clickthrough and conversion rates by localizing not only the copy but also prices. The campaign targeted Danish and Finnish consumers. They tested three variations of the same campaign:
- Copy in English and prices in Euros
- Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in Euros
- Copy in Danish or Finnish and prices in local currency
The third variation yielded the highest results, showing that even though there is one common currency for EU countries, local currency is still important and including it in an offer can make a difference. Consider whether this strategy might be more relevant for B2C companies than B2B companies?
The summit reaffirmed a key lesson for all marketers, wherever our target market is and whichever languages it speaks: the more relevant the email content, the higher the open, clickthrough, and conversion rates will be.
If you are concerned about your email frequency, I’d suggest looking first at how relevant your emails are and then worry if you have the right frequency.
Now it’s time to enjoy a good German beer and the cool spring weather here in Munich. Auf Wiedersehen!
[Editor’s note: Don’t forget to bring back those Hofbräuhaus München goodies and samples for the team, Gaby.]
I would agree, though this is not the case for countries already famililar with the Euro-currency. However, there are further obstacles such as getting the price-points right. Some US-companies do German language Sites but somewhat awkward price-points in euro. And this is true for euro-countries as well. If your selling-cycles start at higher pricepoints with subsequent discounting (as in France), you might not be able to raise much interest in Germany, where people see prices as final and do not expect them to fall after a month.
Thanks for your note, Martin. You make a good point. Yes, some EU countries are more familiar and used to the Euro than others. That’s why you will always want to test your campaigns and see what works best by market. And to your last point, I think it reaffirms the need of a local team to adjust campaigns to market’s specific needs.
Great to see US interest in our really specific european markets. On top of relevancy as a key focus point there is also add landing page optimisation and testing. I just went accross your US Live training and opimtisation Tour. Would you also think about organising the same concept accross Europe? On this point, US experience/markets would be really similar and applicable accross Europe.
Hi Michele. Thanks for posting. We conducted a landing page optimization workshop in Germany earlier this year and there are some new ideas on the table. We’ll keep you posted.