Assume your products can be used in Japan and you decided to send a newsletter to your Japanese subscribers. Should you use English or Japanese in the newsletter? You know that your Japanese subscribers know English well as they are mostly researchers and have scientific publications in English.
To answer this question, we did an experiment. We randomly divided our ~2500 Japanese contacts to two groups and sent an identical newsletter to them at the same time. The only difference is that, we sent the English version to group 1 and the Japanese version to group 2. What is the result?
English vs Native Language
We find the click rate triples (from 1.36% to 4.16%) if we used the Japanese version! People are more willing to engage and click if it is in their native language.
On the other hand, the open rate does not differ much. We see a slight increase of open rate from 21% to 24%.
English vs Native Language (Open Rate)
To make sure we did not find this result by accident, we repeated the experiment to another cohort of Japanese contacts. We find the same result:
English vs Native Language #2
Our result obviously does not only apply to Japanese. We also performed similar experiments to China and the result is same.
Lesson Learned:
- Emails in native language triples the click rate compared to in English. You should prepare your newsletters in the recipients’ native language.