Tips & Tricks: Speak Their Language & Optimize Results with Multilingual Campaigns

Date Sent: May 11th, 2021

Hi there,

Though the pandemic is still dauntingly prevalent, many cities are slowly starting to reopen. The rise of global vaccination rates combined with an increasing number of cities lifting restrictions is reinvigorating consumer wanderlust and desire to travel. Planning a vacation to an unfamiliar place is an exciting task on its own, and for many consumers this means looking up restaurants, historical sights, and brands or shops located in the cities they are visiting. When potential international customers visit a brand's site, the likelihood that they will purchase from that brand drastically increases when those users are served with content in their native language. A global study on consumer language preferences found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products when the information on the site is in their native language, and 40% said that they will never buy from websites in other languages1.

Regardless of whether they have ever shopped your brand in person, serving international customers with site content in their native language ensures positive engagement with your brand and increases the likelihood that they'll buy online. Leverage DY's new Multilingual Campaign Support capabilities to maximize your site's ability to capture and cater to international users. This new feature empowers your team to localize content and manage translations directly from within a single campaign, and without needing to write additional code. Our best practices for scaling and streamlining localized content with Multilingual Support will help your team to incorporate these capabilities into your personalization framework, and optimize customer outcomes by speaking their language.

Best Practice #1: Multilingual Homepage Banner

Prior to this feature, many teams would often create several standalone campaigns with nearly-identical content to align messaging across languages. But this workaround has its setbacks: amassing so many individual, "duplicate" campaigns increases site latency over time. Now with Multilingual Support, teams are empowered to set and manage translations per-variable in each Variation. Any changes made to the Experience (targeting, Variation design, etc.), are applied to all languages at once2. As an initial use case for using this feature, consider creating a strategically placed Dynamic Content homepage banner that leverages localized variables and serve users with messaging in their native language whenever they land on the homepage.

Campaign Setup Overview

Once your team has implemented Multilingual Support, create a Dynamic Content campaign. Use the language-specific, Variables sub-tabs to define the localized content for the Variations:

1. Click the Default language tab and provide inputs for each variable. For text variables, these values should be the messaging you want users to be served with in the default language for your site:
2. Click the tab of a language you want to localize for the Variation. Select the checkboxes to the left of each variable that should be localized and then provide the corresponding values for those variables. The Variation will show the localized content for variables that are checkmarked, and will show the Default content for all other variables (background image, font color, etc.):
3. Click to each relevant language-specific tab and provide values for variables that should be localized. Click the Preview On Site link to preview the Variation in that particular language:

Note: if a variable is checked for a given language but the value field is left empty, then the Variation will render empty text for that variable. In other words, the variable will appear blank for that language.

Best Practice #2: Localized Currency Support

In addition to enabling localized messaging, Multilingual Support also provides Currency Support in Events. Adding a currency property to relevant Events like Purchase, Add to Cart, or any Event with monetary value will enable Dynamic Yield to convert the amount to the default currency that is used in your DY reports. Add localized currency values to your product feed to serve currency-related content to users based on their locale. This is particularly helpful for users that may speak similar languages to the default language of your site.

For instance, say that your site's default language is American English and the default currency is USD. Your team has added a locale parameter to the page context for Australian English, a price property column for AUD in the product feed, and a Currency Event that's fired when users from that locale visit the site. If a user in Australia visits the site, they will fire the Currency Event for that locale, allowing you to easily serve them with currency content in AUD in relevant places across the site. This way, you can ensure that the user is shown localized content in both their language and currency.

Best Practice #3: Multilingual Multi-Touch for New Users

Optimize localized, related content for users that visit your site for the first time with a Multi-Touch campaign and use Multilingual Support for each touchpoint. Using Multi-Touch will enable you to test and measure for the impact of each individual touchpoint as well as the collective impact of the touchpoints for new users across the funnel. 

For example, your team could create a Multi-Touch campaign with Overlay, Notification, and Recommendation touchpoints targeted to a new users Audience (click here for more info on setting up Audiences for New Users vs. Returning Users). The Overlay & Notification touchpoints could serve localized messaging for a welcome offer of a 15% off discount on their first site purchase. The Overlay could be targeted to All Pages and the Notification could be targeted to Category Pages. Consider serving both the Overlay & Notification once per session. The Recommendation touchpoint could use a Strategy with an algorithm like Most Popular and have a localized widget title to let users know that the widget is recommending items that are popular across the site:

When the test concludes, you will be able to analyze both the collective results as well as the results of each individual touchpoint in the Experience Report. In addition to providing you with a guidepost for changes to make to the touchpoints and/or other variables or elements to test next, the results will give you insight into the kinds of pages that new users are navigating to and the campaign types or content that they are most responsive to. This information could be used to inform changes to the overall Variation touchpoints or even help your team to optimize the localized messaging of a touchpoint that is underperforming by comparison.

1"Third Global Survey by CSA Research Finds Language Preference of Consumers in 29 Countries," Slator, July 2020

2"Launch localized campaigns at scale with our multilingual support," Dynamic Yield Blog

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager