Pan European email marketing – are you considering the bigger picture?

With the low cost of set up and implementation for email marketing, are you aware of the simple ways you can significantly extend your marketing reach across Europe?

Many in the UK do not consider themselves part of Europe and while our currency holds out for a myriad of reasons, our target audiences vote with their mice (clicks) and browsers. In the B2B and B2C areas there is an ever-increasing volume of trade in both directions.

Compared with our often multi-lingual European counterparts we, shamefully, seem to have been shouting the same expression over and over again until it sinks in – ‘let them speak English’.

This is madness when you consider that it’s a no-brainer for a pure play internet business model (such as a music download or online gaming site) to open up their service offering to a much larger audience. Interface pages can simply be translated - providing there is applicability and interest in the chosen country.

Increasingly organisations are centralising the strategy and planning of Europe-wide marketing initiatives from a single location and then applying ‘local’ factors for individual markets or sectors.

Selling across Europe

The UK’s weakness in failing to embrace other languages puts us at an immediate disadvantage to our competitors in mainland Europe. They not only recognise the enormity of the opportunity presented by multi-lingual communication, they have mobilised and prepared for it.

From personal experience, gained selling products and services across Europe for a number of years, international business involves using ‘comedy European’. This is an on-the-fly, new language that forms instantaneously when two parties, neither fluent in the other’s tongue, try to help each other during a telephone call or business meeting.

Basic conversational ability was the only barrier I had to overcome to sell extremely complex IT solutions and high-tech products and services throughout France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

Then email came along – out and away the most important sales tool in use today. You can now replicate any sales collateral pieces that have been successful in English straight into another language. Not only that, any ambiguity in meanings arising from language differences can easily be overcome.

People buy things the same way whatever language they speak

Speaking very broadly, B2B and B2C online marketing across Europe has remarkably similar characteristics in each country – but the scale varies widely. The most prevalent online activities across Europe are the same as in the most developed markets: the UK and Germany.

Table: European Internet usage, Internet World Statistics 2007

Email continues to be the primary communication channel for work and non-work communication – with an astonishing 80% and over of the EU adult population using it every day. Why not embrace its ease of use, low costs, and astonishing ROI to reach out to new customers in new markets?

Remember, there is a significant proportion of each EU country that is not only able to converse in English but prepared to do so in order to gain a product or service more suited to their needs or at a more favourable price.

With a small amount of research carried out in-house it is easy to determine if your successful products and services have appeal in other countries, how they are currently being sold or distributed in that country, and at what price they are being sold.

We in the UK spend more money per head (of Internet users) to acquire new customers than any of the other EU-5 countries apart from France. The size of the Online Advertising Market relative to our population and incidence of Internet access is extremely large and the actual cost of acquisition for new customers across products and services is far higher than elsewhere in the EU.

The UK Online Advertising Market reached maturity far sooner than its European neighbours. It has become heavily saturated with offers from businesses resorting to high-risk discounting - acquiring new customers at prices that do not sustain profitable growth unless they re-order a number of times. The risk that a more acquisition hungry competitor comes along with lower prices, deeper pockets, and the ability to withstand a slow burn to profitability, is always present.

The pickings are far richer in overseas European markets. The cost of customer acquisition is lower, the competitive landscape is less cluttered online, and they are almost right on our doorstep.