A few days ago, we saw how we can manage content in international email marketing campaigns, specifically in the fashion industry. Today we are going to present two ideas about how to specifically manage campaigns and reports in the same industry.
1- Three ways to manage an international email marketing campaign
The way in which we are going to manage the campaigns will be shaped significantly by the capabilities of our technology provider, whether an email service provider or a cloud-based marketing platform. Either way, a high capacity platform is not enough to achieve optimal management of an international email marketing and marketing automation campaign. An imaginative approach to campaign management with an innovative mindset that exploits the full potential of the technology is necessary.
Here are three possible ways to manage an international email marketing campaign.
N campaigns for N segments
The most common method when there are few countries to manage, it is quick and easy. This approach focuses on creating a different campaign for each market.
It will consist of uploading the HTMLs of each country, with their respective language versions, UTMs, subjects, preheaders, links, etc., to the individual campaign created on the platform. All the content is directly inserted into the HTML, and a campaign is created for each country
It is a simple and effective method, but when there are more than 5 or 6 versions (countries), the total time consumed increases in such a way that management efficiency decreases.
1 campaign for 1 group of segments with unique HTMLs per country
In this model, a single campaign is created on the marketing platform. The campaign contains query codes for the different content of each country (HTML, subject, UTM, links, etc). The criteria for selecting the content that each user should receive will normally be the country/language field of the database associated with the user’s email. The main work is to create the HTML corresponding to each market and upload it to the platform beforehand. We will also create a HTML repository that will be loaded into the campaign and that will run the query and determine the HTML to select based on the user’s data. We will do the same with the subjects. We list all subjects of each country and apply a conditional query so that one or the other is displayed, depending on the country/language of the user. In the particular case of UTMs, depending on the platform, the management can be done in such a way that a UTM is built dynamically by combining the name of the campaign, generic and common for all versions, with country/language specific to the user. In this way, visits and conversions for each country can be differentiated from a single campaign.
1 campaign for 1 group of segments with content management on the marketing platform
In this case, the logic is similar to the previous scenario, the difference being that the HTML will not be created in advance for each of the countries, but will be fed from a data table uploaded to the platform and will be created dynamically as the campaign is deployed. The focus of this way of managing international campaigns is the use of the personalisation functionalities by variables of the marketing platform. In most cases, marketing platforms allow you to use conditionals to define the content to display based on the value of a field in the database. With this option, the content creation is performed on the platform, so the HTML will have different variables so that the copies, links, subjects, images of each country are filled in depending on the data available in the campaign table. The common elements may already be previously loaded in the HTML and, in the event that there are specific content blocks for some markets, we can create sections with conditionals so that this entire block is shown only to users of a specific country/language.
This way of managing campaigns is supported by the content personalisation features of ESP/Marketing Cloud to manage different language versions. This can be particularly useful for between 5 and 10 language versions. We can customise both the subject, the body of the email, images, UTMs and links
2. Reporting advice
Managing the campaign according to one of the 3 models presented will have implications in the way that the reporting is presented.
In the first case (N campaigns to N segments), access to the metrics by country will not pose any problem, since all systems generate, by default, the reporting of each of the campaigns. In other words, by comparing campaigns, we will also be comparing countries.
The difficulty arises in the second and third models. In both cases, we should be able to access the campaign metrics (remember that it is only 1 campaign) filtering them by the variable country, and not only as a query, but also to be able to export the information separated by country in an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
Not all platforms offer this possibility of filtering the results of a campaign based on a variable in the database. When this is not possible, we will have to think of alternatives when creating the campaign in order to overcome this limitation. One option would be to create query segments (users who have opened or clicked on a campaign) and export them so that the country/language field is included in the export, or else work on the UTMs nomenclatures so that we can analyse the impact of the campaign (in relation to the click), through analytics. Each email marketing tool has its limitations and its advantages, the important thing is to approach it with an open mind and be imaginative in the search for solutions.
Many platforms give you the option of daily and automated export files with all the information related to the activities of your account: list of campaigns sent, list of users who have opened or clicked on a specific campaign, etc. These files are usually imported into other tools such as a CRM or Business Intelligence programme where we can process the data and create personalised reports by cross-referencing information with other fields in our database. By having the information of users which have opened a campaign, we can obtain their country/language and obtain the total engagement metrics of each country.
