When a webshop opens a new country, the ad budget usually goes first. You start buying traffic in Germany, the Netherlands or Norway, the visitors arrive, and some of them sign up. Then they receive a welcome email in Danish or English, because that is the only version that exists.

That is paid traffic leaking out again. A visitor who cannot read the welcome email is unlikely to use the discount in it, and a buyer who gets the post-purchase flow in a foreign language is less likely to order again. The new market ends up looking weaker than it is, simply because the emails never followed the ads into the new language.

Why it stalls

Most brands we talk to know this and still put it off, because every language needs someone who can write in it and few webshops have a copywriter for each country. In practice the welcome flow gets translated once, and the rest of the emails go out in English.

Machine translation makes a first draft quick to get. An email that reads like a translation still tells the customer you are a foreign shop, so the draft needs someone who knows the language and the brand before it goes out.

Set it up in one account

You don't need a Klaviyo account per country. One account with a clear split by language is easier to keep up, since every improvement you make lands in all markets at once.

Save the language on the profile. Capture it where the person signs up: from the version of the store they are on, the country in the order, or a field in the signup form. If you use Shopify Markets, the market already tells you which language the visitor was shopping in. Without that field, every split further down is a guess.

Signup forms per language. The popup is the first thing a new visitor sees from your email program, so it needs to be in their language too. Show each market its own version, with an offer that makes sense there.

Flows that split on language. Build the welcome flow, abandoned cart, post-purchase and win-back flows once, and split each one on the language field. The timing and logic stay the same across markets, and only the content changes. When you improve a flow, every market gets the improvement.

Campaigns per market. A campaign is usually sent as one version per language to a segment built on the language field. Holidays, sales periods and shipping deadlines differ between countries, so each market needs its own send calendar as well as its own text.

SMS with care. The rules for consent and sending times differ from country to country. Check them before you switch SMS on in a new market, and keep SMS to the markets where you have consent collected properly.

Measure each market on its own

Report email revenue per market, and compare each market with its own traffic. A new country with a small list will bring in less than your home market for a long time, and that is fine. What you want to know is whether the share of visitors who sign up and the share of subscribers who buy are close to what you see at home. If they are far below, the language is often the first place to look.

This is also where the economics of a new market are decided. You are paying for traffic there at the same prices as everyone else, and the stores that turn that traffic into repeat buyers in the local language can afford to pay more for each customer.

Where Markeity comes in

We write, design and translate email and SMS for our clients in the languages they sell in, so customers in a new market get emails written for them. If you are opening a new country, or already selling in one with emails in the wrong language, book a free 15-minute call. If you are not sure your current setup holds up, start with how to check a Klaviyo account in 15 minutes.