If your business is truly going to go global your going to have to learn about Unicode. Find out how Unicode can power your company’s global marketing efforts.

Tips on global text marketing with Unicode

Is your business taking advantage of the opportunities in the border-free digital economy? Global trade has never been easier, and technologies like Unicode and global SMS can drive international sales.

Doing business across borders

The internet offers golden opportunities for brands to reach their customers, and language plays an important role in this connected marketplace.

If you’re engaging with global clients, they want you to speak their language.

A study involving emerging brands in the U.S found that although they had a global customer base, the majority of them were only marketing to these countries in English. And that’s just bad for business.

In 2012, Common Sense Advisory surveyed over 2000 web consumers in eight countries. More than half of the customers would pay more for a product if businesses conveyed their messaging in their own languages.

And the world’s fastest-growing markets are in languages very different from English. Shopify calls China and the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, the “new growth horizon”.Chinese is the world’s most spoken language - over 1 billion first-language speakers worldwide (including regional groups of Chinese and Mandarin). It also reports the world’s highest e-commerce revenue and is expected to reach over 1 trillion U.S dollars by 2022.

Conveying effective messaging to customers in these regions must be at the heart of your multilingual SMS marketing campaign strategies.

The power of Unicode and global SMS

Unicode can power your company’s global marketing efforts. When you combine Unicode with the reliability of SMS, customers will receive messages in their language no matter where they are in the world.

Our SMS platform delivers billions of messages across thousands of networks worldwide. Our system will recognize when a message needs to be encoded to ensure the best delivery for your message. And a 98 percent open rate for bulk SMS messages means your customers will open just about every message you send.

When you send messages through Clickatell Platform, the system will automatically determine the encoding required to deliver your messages. If characters in your texts are not supported by a mobile network carrier, Clickatell will take care of converting the message to the hexadecimal Unicode format required for delivery. So, there’s no burden on your developer teams - all the encoding is done for you.

How to run a multilingual marketing campaign

If you’re ready to package multilingual marketing campaigns, you need a relevant, well-researched marketing strategy.

Listen to your audience

Like all types of marketing, begin with understanding your audience. Make sure your global marketing strategy draws from rich buyer personas so that you can deliver marketing experiences that better relate to your consumers. A deep understanding of your customers will help your brand avoid tone-deaf marketing campaigns that don’t translate well in new markets.

Even major brands like Mercedes-Benz found themselves at the center of cross-border brand blunders. The car manufacturer entered China under the name Bensi, which means “rush to die” in Mandarin.

Create omnichannel experiences

Finding customers on their favorite channels is central to building meaningful relationships. For instance, while Facebook dominates as the biggest social network in the West, Tencent QQ is popular in China.

SEMRush suggests researching target platforms for new markets, assessing the options for paid, shared and earned media. The growth in demand for omnichannel experiences means you can create tailored marketing messaging across platforms.

Go beyond borders with global SMS

In business, global SMS and Unicode expand your reach. To learn more about the business value of this approach, read our article on the specific benefits of multilingual SMS marketing.