Email localization can make your brand stand out as more thoughtful and customer-centric. When emails are properly localized to match the cultural context, language preferences, and regional expectations of recipients, they generate significantly higher open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately conversions. People naturally respond better to content that feels personally relevant. Besides copy translation, email localization includes adjusting imagery, tone of voice, and other parameters to provide culturally relevant emails for your global audience. It may seem like a time-consuming process, but this is where GenAI tools come in handy by speeding up the translation process and automating most of the localization efforts.
In this article, we will explore the challenges marketers encounter with traditional email localization, demonstrate how GenAI can address these issues (including tips for optimal results), and discuss the importance of human post-editing to ensure natural language and cultural accuracy.
Traditional email localization: Challenges marketers face
Email marketers face some common challenges when localizing emails through traditional methods, such as relying on marketing agencies or handling it manually without GenAI tools.
- Time-consuming process
Manual localization requires significant effort from your email marketing team. This includes translating email copy, selecting relevant imagery, adjusting units of measurement, and formatting for different languages. For example, before manually localizing your English emails, whether a certain idiom translates well or not you need to look for a local alternative.
All these tasks take a lot of time and localized emails should go through several rounds of revisions to ensure accuracy, making it a time-intensive process.
- High costs for email marketing teams
Professional translation agencies typically charge per project or hourly. Besides translation fees, you may need to consult with localization experts to ensure cultural relevance. Even if your in-house team manages email localization, you still end up using valuable resource hours for their time spent on translations, editing, and cultural adjustments. As a result, your team has less time to work on strategic email marketing tasks. If you work in several markets and localize emails frequently, this approach to email localization may be a costly investment.
- Cultural misunderstandings that can cause offense
While localizing emails for subscribers around the world, it’s important to work on the entire email content besides copy—banners, images, currency, units of measurement, and more. You should also spend some time considering local holidays and traditions—sending a promo campaign for Singles’ Day on November 11th (the most popular shopping event in China) may confuse your subscribers from Europe.
Image adaptation is also crucial; for instance, car ad emails should reflect the correct driving orientation (left-hand drive for U.S. recipients versus right-hand drive for Japanese subscribers). Without taking into account symbols and colors, political sensitivity, clothing and modesty, animal symbolism, public health crises, and religious context, your emails can look irrelevant or even offensive.
How GenAI can help marketers overcome email localization challenges
GenAI can revolutionize your email localization process by streamlining workflows and enhancing global communication. Here’s how GenAI translation tools can help you tackle the challenges mentioned above:
- Time-effective solution
GenAI tools can help you speed up the email translation process, reducing the time required from several business days to one. Unlike traditional methods that rely solely on human translators, GenAI tools can translate copy and optimize emails for different subscriber segments in seconds, considering cultural nuances, customs, date formats, and units of measurement. Then, a native-speaking translator can post-edit the email for accuracy, allowing you to focus on content refinement rather than spending days localizing emails from scratch.
(Source: Email from Specialized Bicycle Components)
Narrato’s AI email writer can generate email content in any of the major languages for your global markets. All you have to do is set the default language for all AI generations to your preferred language in the workspace settings. You have access to different email writing templates such as promotional email generator, sales email generator and others that generate email tailored to your use case.
If you want to translate your marketing emails from the parent language, Narrato also offers a powerful AI translation tool for this.
Typeface is another revolutionary AI marketing platform that can help you generate localized and personalized emails for any audience and market. Typeface’s Email Agent can generate entire email arcs for a multi-step customer journey or single touch emails tailored for different audience segments. It lets you customize the copy and the visuals in your emails to resonate with the target market, keeping the content geo-culturally relevant.
- Streamlined and budget-friendly translations
Most GenAI tools operate on a subscription-based model, making it easier to budget, especially for frequent email localization. This AI-powered approach is often more cost-effective due to its ability to automate the localization process. While native speakers are still needed for oversight to ensure cultural relevance, GenAI for email localization can help reduce translation costs and improve efficiency.
- Cultural insights and relevance
Unlike basic machine translation, modern GenAI tools can be trained to recognize cultural differences, local holidays, idioms, and more. By providing your brand’s style guide and information about your global subscriber segments, GenAI can adjust images, currency, date formats, and even tone of voice to align with different audiences while maintaining your unique style.
For example, a generic winter holiday campaign may resonate in many countries, but GenAI can analyze your recipients’ local preferences and suggest adaptations for local traditions—Yule in Scandinavia and Germany, Kwanzaa for African Americans, and Lunar New Year for subscribers from China.
(Source: Email from Disturbia)
Human post-editing during the GenAI email localization process
Machine translation accuracy has improved—74% for English-to-French and 73% for English-to-German—but it is not flawless.
That’s why human post-editing is essential to verify natural language and cultural accuracy. While GenAI email localization can save time and costs, a human-in-the-loop approach is ideal in most situations. Let’s explore how to select the right method to ensure successful multilingual email campaigns.
When to choose a traditional approach with translation agencies?
- You have ample time and are willing to wait for an email that sounds more lexically accurate (human translation typically takes longer as specialists handle multiple clients).
- You can afford a more expensive solution for email localization. Translation agencies or freelancers usually charge per project or hourly, making budgeting less predictable than subscription-based services.
When to choose a hybrid approach with GenAI tools and human post-editing?
- You have limited time and budget but need to localize a large volume of emails for different subscriber segments. Human translators can refine your email content and check it for accuracy after AI processing, making the process faster and more cost-effective.
- You frequently need to verify the relevance of holidays, customs, and traditions across different countries or regions.
- You are prepared to handle GenAI-generated content that may require human proofreaders to enhance the language and add a personal touch.
(Source: Email from Chanel)
How to get the best results using GenAI for email localization
Now that you understand the benefits of combining GenAI tools with human post-editing, let’s explore how to achieve optimal results in GenAI for email localization.
- Mention the country of your target audience
Be specific about the country or region of your subscriber segments when creating prompts for AI-powered email localization. GenAI tools will utilize this information to analyze your subscribers’ language and tone preferences, cultural nuances, traditions, holidays, and units of measurement, aligning your email with the local context.
For instance, if you highlight that you want to localize your promo email for recipients from Germany, GenAI tools may adjust elements like formal or informal forms of address (Sie vs. du), relevant date format (DD.MM.YYYY), and currency (€). If the dates of your campaign match with one of the traditional German holidays like Oktoberfest or German Unity Day, GenAI tools can offer you to mention this in the email to acknowledge your recipients.
- Provide custom instructions
Custom instructions for GenAI are crucial for maintaining consistency in tone, vocabulary, style, and formatting preferences, ultimately reducing post-editing time. Create a glossary of preferred words and phrases to ensure alignment across future translations. Include industry-specific terminology, abbreviations, idioms, and preferred translations, as well as any terms you wish to avoid.
For example, if you prefer the term “clients” over “customers,” want to use “promo code” instead of “discount code,” or maintain sentence cases throughout your texts, be sure to provide this information to GenAI tools. On Narrato, you can save these rules under the Style Guide and easily apply or reject the style guide suggestion on the editor.
(Source: Email from Dior)
- Offer feedback on translations
Consider GenAI a valuable junior team member who requires your ongoing review and feedback to improve translation quality. The more information you provide about your brand and target audience, the better the results will become over time. Correcting its mistakes will help ensure more accurate translations in the future, and your consistent feedback on terminology, style, and formatting will significantly expedite the translation process.
- Give constant updates
If you modify any vocabulary or formatting preferences, add new idioms, or discover valuable cultural insights, share this information with your GenAI tool. For instance, if you plan to enter a new market where certain colors or animals carry specific meanings, this knowledge will help GenAI localize your emails more effectively.
Wrapping up
The combination of GenAI tools and human post-editing for email localization is an excellent way to accelerate the translation process, reduce costs, avoid cultural misunderstandings, and deliver relevant content to your global recipients. GenAI tools provide immediate results, but you will still need native speakers to refine your content instead of localizing it from scratch.
Remember that GenAI learns from the data you “feed” it, so providing your brand style guide, specifying target audience countries, giving custom instructions, and offering detailed feedback on translations and ongoing updates about vocabulary, local idioms, and cultural nuances is essential for effective email localization.
Author:
Olena Zinkovska,
Editor and content writer at Stripo
I strive to make my content engaging, relevant, and valuable for those who want to empower their marketing efforts with attention-grabbing and meaningful emails. Do you want your messages to get opened and read? You are in the right place to make it happen!
