3 Methods to help Dual-Language Businesses

Sharing my experience with managing multiple languages in ActiveCampaign:

Possible only for email body text. Subject lines and preheaders cannot be personalized this way natively. The only workaround is to use the HTML builder build a code condition there and then copy-paste this code to the subject line and preheader. Conclusion: Might be okayish for emails in 2 languages, although if you need to update or fix something your subject or preheader it is not visually convenient as you don’t see your whole code. Easy to make mistakes and break the condition code.
Solution:

• Good: Allow conditional emails/subject lines/sender names/sender email addresses (I mean as a whole package: Language = EN => use these subject/preheader/sender. Language =>ES – use other subject/preheader/sender). And one of the conditions should be also set as default (when customer does not match with any of the conditions this one will be shown to him)
• Perfect: Make campaigns completely multilingual. Just allow to set any field in ActiveCampaign as a locale field. Ideally two fields since often you have audiences in the same language but in different regions. So locales can be en/de/fr but also en-eu, en-uk, en-tr, en-us etc. So it will be good to set two fields as locale fields: Language and Region. Then when creating campaigns users can just create separate version inside the same campaign and for each of its versions they can choose a combination of conditions:
  • Email A is sent to EN-EU, NL, PL, SV audiences (for example in this case company has people with Dutch, Polish and Norwegian languages in the app but these audiences are not big enough to start sending a separate localized newsletter. So company desides to send default English European version to these people)
  • Email B is sent to DE audience.
  • Email C is sent to EN-UK audience etc.
  • Additionally, integrate this interface with Stripo, ActiveCampaign’s editor. It already has a perfect solution for translating emails (either automatically with Google translate or very conveniently with xlsx files).

Works if you have 2-3 languages. If more your whole automation becomes too complex and not manageable. Mistakes are super easy to make. And it is hard to go back to your older campaigns and understand their structure and logic.
Solution:

• Good: Allow to group/ungroup automation actions. Specifically you can group all if/else actions related to languages (if language is A - send A, - else - if language is B - send B - else ....) into one group. This way you have a good overview of your whole automation logic and can unfold the email sending actions when you need to change specifically emails.
• Also good: create a special Send conditional email action which will look like one step inside the automation but when you open it you can specify different sets of conditions and create different emails for each set of conditions.
• Perfect: If “Perfect” option from method 1 is developed (multilingual campaigns) you can easily add it to Send email steps.

In my opinion, optimal if you have multiple languages and multiple emails inside. A major downside: Instead of one automation for one goal you have a lot of them and if you need to change one trigger of update some automation action, add some steps etc. instead of doing it once you have to do it in every single automation. But at least it is “easy” to have an overview inside one automation since the logic has the same complexity as any other one-language automation.

And method 4 I was recently started to test:

• Build an automation like you would need for a single-language campaign
• But instead of all “send email” actions use step “Start new automation”
• In automation chosen in this step you just have one action – Send email. In this case you can just create an automation with the email sending step only split into if/else branches. It will have only if language is A send email A else if language is B send email B else if language is C...

This way you have separate automations for separate emails in all your languages but your main automation responsible for the whole logic remains simple.Advantages: No need to change X triggers for X languages or update the same steps in X automations when you need to make changes.
Disadvantage: Your send email automation would still be quite complicated. But at least it is only for sending emails and it is not that hard to manage

Thanks for sharing!