One of the consequences of the rapid progress of the digitalisation of marketing and sales in the fashion industry is internationalisation. Thanks to e-commerce, many brands are accessing international markets for the first time, and brands that already had a presence in other countries are moving into new ones. As a consequence, e-commerce, CRM and digital marketing departments face the challenge of developing and managing content that is adapted to each market, particularly in terms of local pricing, currency, language and legal aspects.
In the case of email marketing, the complexity of managing campaigns across different markets (whether countries or geographical areas) is compounded by production and revision times which, especially in the fashion sector, tend to be very short.
In this first part of the post, we will see how to manage content in international email marketing campaigns in the fashion industry.
1- HTML texts instead of image
One of the bottlenecks in the process of preparing an email marketing campaign is at the review and changes phase. Last minute changes usually occur at this stage that affect the translated copies in the different language versions (texts, prices, legal information, etc.) and this becomes more complicated when text changes have to be made on image files, and the date of scheduling is imminent. Bear in mind that the treatment of an image file can take up to 4 times longer than managing a text change directly on the HTML. If we choose to use texts in HTML whenever possible, change management will be much faster and more agile and extra work will be avoided, with the chances of errors also reduced.
It is advisable to establish a direct communication channel between translators and developers in a shared work environment, where any changes are easily accessible and are reported to all parties involved. This can be managed with a project manager, or even with an Excel spreadsheet shared in the cloud.
2- Use shared content on the marketing platform
It is a general principle of project management to use the maximum possible number of fixed elements, those which are exempt from processing or manipulation. We have to get more out of the technological platform and optimise the management of the common content between the usual campaigns. Most platforms have a Shared Content functionality, which consists of hosting blocks of content that can be used in different campaigns according to requirements. This resource is very useful for hosting the headers and footers of the campaigns, as well as menus, logos, social networks, contact data, etc.), but it can also be used to host common content that can be used in more than one campaign such as promotional banners, e-commerce service modules or webstores, or even dynamic and personalised content such as cross-selling, birthday campaigns or loyalty programmes.
The main advantage of relying on shared content is that when a content change occurs in any of these elements, the change need only be managed once, and it will be applied to all campaigns automatically.
3- Legal texts in promotional periods
Sometimes the legal conditions may change according to the promotional periods and the particular cases of each country at a given time. If this is a recurring situation, it is preferable that this type of content is kept in a separate module from the shared footers and treated as another text element of the campaign. We incorporate this information into the HTML every time we create a new campaign, as we do with the other copies, thus avoiding the need to edit the shared content for each different country.
In the second part of the post we will present two ideas about how to specifically manage campaigns and reports in the same industry.
