When building internationalized email campaigns, it’s natural that web developers want to be involved in creating every version for each language.  This allows the developer to ensure the visual quality of the email. However, the downside to a development heavy approach is that it can greatly affect the velocity of getting these emails sent. Many teams that follow this type of process find themselves blocked by developers availability.

Let’s face it, localizing a large web site or marketing campaign for an enterprise company is a challenging endeavor.  In any localization process, especially in a big company, there are often many people who get involved. To complicate matters, there are teams that don’t use the same tools and technology. This results in frustrating discussions like “I didn’t get the file you emailed me” or “I don’t have access to the right system”.   Though these types of issues are easy to fix, where people and roles change frequently, they tend to happen repeatedly.

Marketing segmentation for emails is difficult to get “right”.  When you add multilingual content into the mix it gets even harder.  One of the biggest pitfalls, however, is confusing language codes for marketing segmentation. In this blog post I’m going to talk about why these should be treated differently and offer some strategies for dealing with them.

Publishing content is changing. This is not a new statement since due to the Internet and social media the WAY content is consumed has been changing for quite some time.  Unfortunately the “backend” of how content is created and managed has not seen much change. Many content management solutions have not changed much in recent years. Most content management systems still heavily rely on a relational database backend coupled with a front-end technology to publish web pages. This poses a challenge when you are attempting to manage multilingual content in these systems. More over having content at scale means dealing with multiple teams located in different countries around the world.