Using Scientific Marketing Email Localisation to Build a Bigger Global Client Base
Using scientific marketing email localisation to build a bigger global client base.
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting vaccine rollout have taught us like never before that global illnesses require global cures. To make sure all parts of the world are getting effective treatments, it’s important to localise your marketing efforts.
This means that it has never been more important to use a localisation strategy approach in attracting pharmaceutical clients. To reach clients, make sure you have customised, localised email campaigns.
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A survey from Gartner shows that brands can risk losing 38% of customers from poor marketing personalisation efforts. So below we’ll look at using a localised marketing strategy for emails, answer the question of what a localisation strategy is and consider the benefits that it can deliver.
Localising your scientific marketing emails
Localisation should be a major priority for any global brand. While localisation isn’t limited to international brands, it can help a global enterprise reach certain regions in a way that connects better with local consumers.
What is a localisation strategy? A localisation strategy handles all aspects of making a marketing message and/or product fit into certain regions. It can handle small details like updating currency symbols to larger, whole-message approaches, such as making sure the message’s tone does not offend local cultures. Even translating the language of the message is often considered part of the overall localisation process. In short, localisation is the process of making sure other regions can understand your message.
While it may seem daunting, the first step in starting a localisation strategy is to research and understand your audience. These days, many companies make use of big data sources like trending topics on social media or POS data from certain regions to understand what is selling, what’s being talked about and how consumers in other regions are motivated or behave. You might also consider conducting or reviewing surveys and focus groups in the region you are looking to sell in, to further understand the behaviours and motivations of consumers.
Email marketing tools
Once you understand the market you wish to sell in, you can start looking at making the marketing emails that you will send out to potential clients in that region. There are many technical considerations for finding the right email marketing tools. A few of the considerations include:
How many contacts or lists you can manage in the system: If you are managing contacts across the globe and using lists for certain regions, you may need a system that helps manage a high yield of contacts and lists in a way that is easy to navigate.
Elements of personalisation: Experian found that marketing emails that are personalised have six times higher transaction rates. Personalisation is especially important if you are targeting consumer habits or motivations in different regions. Working in different regions can change how the entire email reads, most obviously accounting for different languages. Or sometimes you might just find certain regional consumer preferences include little personalisation touches, like auto-including someone’s name at the top of the email. Make sure your email marketing tool can handle a high degree of personalisation, as some are very limited and template-based.
A/B tests: The best email marketing tools for a localisation strategy will allow you to conduct A/B testing, which helps you show different versions of an email to different segments to see which performs better. Some programs allow you to A/B test everything in the email, from email titles to images. This feature can be useful for a localisation strategy because it can help you better understand what works and what doesn’t in different regions.
Analytics and tracking: These tools help you understand how your customers are behaving through data such as click-through and open rates. Data like this is a real-time look into how well you are personalising and localising your emails, since it tracks whether you are making a real connection with people. Make sure you can track as much as possible and that the tool makes it easy to understand the data.
As a note, you may find some tools that allow for automatic translation. However, if you are seeking to connect to clients in the pharmaceutical industry, these machine translation options aren’t a good bet. Because these emails are a type of medical translation, they require a high level of attention to detail. A human translator will know how certain medical terminology needs to sound in certain regions.
A poor translation can do more than look like a spam email: it can also fatally misrepresent a drug in terms of what it can do, how it works, contraindications and more. As such, make sure to always use qualified medical language professionals for your marketing emails as part of your localisation strategy.
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Benefits of getting your email localisation right
One of the benefits of getting your email localisation strategy right is that you can build connections and trust. And you can do it from behind a computer and from across the globe. If you nail that localised marketing strategy through email, you can get people interested in your product, establish yourself as a leader in the industry and come across as a true expert in the field.
A good email localisation strategy can also lead to greater response rates. The risk of not localising your emails the proper way is that you can come across as spam, or in worst cases, a scam. One of the common ways to detect fraud online is to look at the grammar or information contained in an email. Scams often feature poor grammar or include incorrect or odd information. If you can look highly professional and connect with email recipients on a personal level, you can build trust, so that recipients are more likely to respond to your email.
Conclusion
People buy from people. If you take the time to understand consumer habits in the region you wish to sell in, have comprehensive email marketing tools that help you reach those audiences and personalise and localise your emails well, you can encourage clients to contact you. Someone who feels like a product is tailored to them is more likely to take that product seriously and, ultimately, more likely to purchase it.
For more on email marketing in healthcare and the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help, see our section on email and marketing automation.
Guest contributor: Miggy Bondoc.