Inspiration
Mailchimp is an easy to use web- based marketing automation platform designed and developed for businesses using email to reach out to their target markets. You can manage your mailing lists and create your own email templates. With this in mind Andrew Taylor, Yen Ting Low and I decided to collaborate together to work on localizing Pokémon Newsletters using Crowdin and its integration with Mailchimp. We all had experience with translating in Crowdin so we wanted to put MailChimp to good use by utilizing its platform to create our own email template and mailing lists for the Pokémon Newsletters from English into JA, zh-TW, and es-MX. After the set up process we used Crowdin to translate the newsletters and voila the subscribers would receive their newsletters based on their preferred language.
If you are short on time, the following 3 minute video contains a quick walkthrough of the process.
Integration
The first part was fairly straight forward and we did not hit any road bumps with Mailchimp and Crowdin integration as we have seen with other integrations we have run into into in the past with localizing websites. The way we got our newsletters into CrowdIn was by going to Crowdin searching for the MailChimp integration in marketplace and after selecting it you can press install to activate it. Once you’ve installed Mailchimp, you go back to your project and go to settings, integration, and then you log into your MailChimp account. Now we go into files which is simple as all you have to do is select files from Mailchimp and hit sync, and sending your translated files in Crowdin back to MailChimp is accomplished through the exact same process.
Newsletter Template
Here comes the fun part. When creating the templates we first had to create a campaign for our Pokémon Newsletters and through that campaign we could choose a chosen template or a saved created template. Of course we wanted to give the subscribers same experience as original English newsletters so we made it our goal to get close as possible or exact to the original newsletters. We went into creation mode where we had the option to use their email templates, create our own with code or choose a theme. When we first started we wondered how we would get the flat image of the boxes since it had text and specific border colors. That’s when we decided to play around with coding the email template but took up more time than expected and did not quite work as we planned with our programming experience. We then decided it would make the process easier and smoother by taking in those pictures with text into Photoshop. Andrew masked the text and then localized them with all of our chosen languages and brought them back into Mailchimp. Once that was done I took on the email template that Yen Ting started by playing around with blocks and style until I was able to actually to my surprise get the exact style as original newsletters.
Translations
As the email template was finished we created 3 campains for the 3 Pokémon Newsletters we would be translating into JA, zh-TW, and es-MX and used the created email template for each. We synched them into Crowdin and began translations in our own working target language. As for the images we would use the new URLs with the localized images in the translation process and also made sure to link up the images that lead to the website with its correct regions, since unlike the newsletters, the website was localized into other regions. As soon as all translations were done then we synced back the translated newsletters into Mailchimp where we would then figure out managing subscribers.
Subscriptions
Yen Ting’s role in the process was to ensure that each subscriber on the mailing list received one newsletter in their preferred language. He figured that the Groups function in Mailchimp would best establish the subscription preference. The newsletter signup allows for group incorpoartion and the subscribers’ choice will be saved for fture reefernece. For our newlstters he decided that we would base the group on preferred laaguges soince trasbaltions were one of our bihest task. Yeng Ting then called the group Preferred Language and added the languages we worked with as options.
The newsletters are sent to everyone in the mailing list by default, but with Yen ting’s group creation we were able to make it so that only recipients that fall into specific language groups will receive an individual newsletter. Another issue he found and we each resolved was that the From (sender) and Subject fields were unfortunately not supported by Crowdin and needed to be translated manually. However, the newsletter itself has been taken care of by Crowdin, and any updated image links are reflected as well. Once everything was ready, we hit “Send”, and a fresh localized newsletter based on our preferred language appeared in our inbox!
