Jennifer Chew
Product Marketing ManagerSmartling
Marketing is all about reaching customers in the right place, at the right time. The most effective marketing campaigns coordinate and align enticing messaging across multiple channels and relay this messaging to the most relevant, targeted audiences.
That is why marketing automation, and more specifically a platform to enable such automation, matters. Rather than sending one-off messages to static groups of customers, marketing automation platforms enable marketers to create scalable campaigns based on user behavior and intent.
You may be familiar with marketing automation brands like Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, and Eloqua. These solutions gather customer engagement data across a number of different marketing channels - email, social media, web page visits, and so on - and provide ways to set up responses with marketing engagement actions that encourage customers to take the next step towards making a purchase. Many of these solutions also provide analytics into how different engagement channels and campaigns are performing with customers or subsets of customers.
Braze, a leading marketing automation solution for mobile
In recent years, marketing automation solutions have come out that specialize in creating personalized messages for specific channels or focus on a specific automation capability. All-in-one solutions can be more bulky to maintain and manage, whereas specialized solutions can perform really well for a specific channel. This is key for brands that have identified a channel with high conversion potential and want to invest resources to optimize this specific channel’s performance.
As we have seen (as far back as 2012), mobile has become the dominant channel of communication. From push notifications, to in-app messages, to mobile-optimized emails and sites, marketers can create unique experiences at the consumer’s fingertips.
Braze saw this potential early on and is a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms. Braze has become one of the most popular customer engagement platforms to create personalized customer experiences across channels and the entire customer lifecycle for mobile app, retail, and dining brands.
Translating Braze content: best practices
But reaching customers in their pocket devices is only as good as ensuring they understand your messages - meaning, your messages are delivered in languages they understand. This is especially critical for mobile marketing, as a large number of mobile-first internet users are spread across China, India, and other emerging markets.
Braze enables your brand to scale marketing automation campaigns for global audiences, particularly on mobile, but also across all your content. Here are our tips for preparing content in Braze for translation:
- Utilize API endpoints with Braze’s email templates and content blocks - Users can prepare email templates and content blocks in Braze for integration with a Translation Management System (TMS). This type of integration allows for the seamless transfer of new content to your translators to start working on immediately when it’s available. If you need other types of Braze content translated, you can export HTML templates of your content, and drag-and-drop those files into your TMS.
- Capture the layout of your messages to provide your translators with visual context - Mobile messaging’s short and snappy format makes it perfect for capturing customers’ attention in a split second. Though at the same time, the limited character count and screen layout add extra layers of challenge for translators. To recreate the messaging in another language and have it fit within the layout and context, it’s important for translators to know what kind of space and design they’re working within. Provide them with screenshots of your message layout to help them create copy that works within the final design.
- Choose translators with experience in mobile messaging - Mobile messaging is full of acronyms and slang that require a lot of language fluency to translate clearly and effectively. Make sure your translators have experience with translating for this type of medium, as the tone will be quite different from blog articles and product UI information. Better yet, make sure they’re using mobile communications and mobile apps in their languages on a regular basis to keep up with new local lingo. (A new acronym seems to come about every day!)
Scaling your Braze content is great for reaching global consumers right in their pockets, but personalization will remain key to grabbing their attention and developing loyalty going forward. When it comes to achieving scale and personalization for your global markets, streamlined and high-quality translation is the final layer for success.
Smartling has extensive experience with helping top brands translate their marketing automation content seamlessly. If you’re looking to translate your content in Braze or another platform, let’s find time to chat!
