Findmykids Case: How to Create an Email in 23 Languages and Cut Time-to-Market by 2x

Thanks to online translators, companies don’t need polyglot employees to communicate with customers from different countries. But how many resources do they need to stay in touch with multilingual audiences in direct channels? Using the example of a Yespo customer, we will tell you how simple integration helped save more than 10 hours of work for preparing a multilingual newsletter.

About the Project

Findmykids is a family-focused location app that helps parents stay connected with their children and remain confident in their safety. To take advantage of the service, you need to install the application on your smartphone and connect your child’s phone or GPS watch. Using the tracker, you can identify your child's location in real time and the history of their movements during the day. Parents can also keep peace of mind thanks to the following features:

• sending a loud signal that will be heard on the device in silent mode;
• battery level tracking;
• screen time analytics;
• listening to the sounds of the child’s environment.

In addition, the application provides tasks for children that develop useful skills and habits, as well as a family chat with stickers.

More than 7 million users from more than 175 countries have already experienced the benefits of the service. Findmykids is localized in 45 languages and is one of the top apps in the “Parenting” category on Google Play.

Challenge

The company’s first rule in interacting with customers is to communicate in the user’s language. In addition to notifications in the application itself, Findmykids reach the audience using an email through the Yespo platform. Creating letters required a significant amount of manual work: it was necessary to create up to 45 recipient segments and language versions of the letter. In addition, testing the display of each email option took a lot of time since the company believed that the users should receive only carefully tested messages.

The Yespo team was faced with the task of choosing the best way to quickly prepare multilingual newsletters.

Solution

Yespo CDP has several options with which you can send bulk and trigger messages to each user in the desired language:

• creation of dynamic groups based on language;
• checking variables in a workflow;
• special functionality for multilingual campaigns;
• substitution of data from an external source.

The first two methods are free and suit companies that do not use many languages in communication. Otherwise, the account will be filled with a large number of segments and copies of messages.

Thanks to multilingual features, you can avoid dividing contacts into groups. You will also have all language versions within one letter and convenient analytics for each segment in one report. The system will automatically detect the language of the contact specified in their profile and send the right language version of the message.

This functionality was not suitable for Findmykids for two reasons.

1. Data about the contact language was not stored in a special system field required for multilingual functionality but in an additional one. When installing the application, the location of the device is determined, and the user can select a convenient interface language. This data is tagged according to the international ISO system and transmitted to Yespo using the API method for creating and updating contacts. Information about the user's country and language is recorded in the additional “Locale” field of the contact profile.

To use multilingual features, it was necessary to finalize the integration and change the field to save the user's language attribute.

2. Each language version of the message must be created manually, so preparing letters was still labor-intensive.

Yespo specialists suggested connecting Google Sheets as an external data source, with which you can insert any personalized content into messages. The client was planning a mailing to 500,000 users about a global promotion in 23 countries, and we used a new method to prepare it.

Creating a table and letter layout

Setting up multilingual email using Google Sheets consists of several steps.

1. Preparation of an email message layout in any convenient language. The text of the letter must be divided into conditional phrases, for example, header, body text 1, button, body text 2, etc. The subject of the letter should be a separate phrase.

2. Creating a data source — tables in Google Sheets. Each line corresponds to a language, and each column corresponds to the conventional phrases into which the letter is divided:

The name of the locales in the file must correspond to the values ​​transmitted in the additional field.

3. Connecting a table as an external data source in Yespo account settings.

4. Setting up dynamic content in an email using the Apache Velocity library and code editor.

Yespo technical support specialists prepared examples of filling out tables and letters and trained the Findmykids team to work with Velocity so that they could independently create any mailings. The email template consisted entirely of dynamic content, and layouts for other languages did not need to be created.

“I am a fairly advanced user of CDP systems, and usually the rules for displaying dynamic content in messages on such platforms are similar. You need to substitute an attribute that matches the parameter in the source. Therefore, the setup did not cause any difficulties for me, but even for a beginner it would be very simple. The level of programming knowledge required is zero when you use Yespo. The Yespo interface is very clear, the message editor is convenient, and any PC user is familiar with the tables. To work, we only needed an example, which we received from support. Based on the fully completed layout, we created a content document and an email to send out.” 

Illia Vakhrushev, Findmykids CRM Marketer.

The upcoming campaign covered an audience all over the world, so 2 tables were prepared for the mailing:

Testing and launching the newsletter

After creating a letter layout and an external source, Findmykids specialists sent a message to test contacts in order to check the content substitution in 23 language options in the email. After making sure that each version was correct, the newsletter was sent to 10% of the recipient base for additional verification.

There were no complaints from customers about the language of the letters, and Findmykids technical support also confirmed the absence of errors. The team verified that the method worked correctly and launched a campaign for the remaining 90% of contacts.

• for languages with text written from left to right;
• for languages with text written from right to left.

Results

The campaign received the expected open rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate. Findmykids managed to prepare a campaign 2 times faster while maintaining efficiency.

“Preparing the letter in the new format took about 12 hours, with a significant part of the time spent getting to know the functionality and thorough testing. I think that in the future, creating newsletters this way will take even less time. Compared to the previous global campaign, it took us 24 hours to prepare it.

We have reduced the time to market by half while increasing the quality of work. When you need to create 45 email layouts for your entire audience, the likelihood of errors is very high. In the case of automation, this probability is greatly reduced: we work with texts in one document, where everything is immediately visible, and it is easier to notice any inaccuracies. We don't need to test each layout separately. We are pleased with the result and plan to continue using this functionality.”

Illia Vakhrushev, Findmykids CRM Marketer.

Future Plans

Findmykids specialists appreciated the convenience of preparing promo campaigns in a new way with Yespo. Now, they are planning to implement several solutions that will make it possible to extract even more benefits from such integration with an external source.

1. Transferring the user's language attribute to a special field in Yespo. This change will allow the company to automatically receive statistics for each language segment within the mailing report in Yespo account.

Before this setting was implemented, such analytics could be obtained by building segments manually.

2. Multilingual layouts for triggered campaigns. The new format will significantly reduce the number of groups and messages in the account.

3. Technical support work automation. The functionality will simplify another type of communication with users for the Findmykids team.

“We got a solution to our problem because multilingualism was a challenge for us — not only the marketing department uses it, but also the support team. If some bug occurs in one version of the application, users from several countries may face it too. In this case, we have to waste even more time on manual work. For example, an application outage affected only one customer in Spain, but we cannot keep silent about it. So, even for one client, we need to prepare a separate communication workflow: create a letter, translate it, and test it.

We have not yet trained the support department specialists to work with a multilingual table, so they are still suffering :) But we will definitely teach them how to use this automation opportunity. They will also experience how simple, effective, and fast it is to work with multilingual campaigns using integration with an external source. We plan that 80% of letters will be sent with this mechanism.”

Illia Vakhrushev, Findmykids CRM Marketer.

By automating routine tasks, the Findmykids team got more time to develop new ideas and improve user communication. If you would also like to optimize monotonous processes with a customer data platform, contact us, and our specialists will help you choose the right tools for your business needs.

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