Are you truly ready to send globally?

Anna Levitin got into email by accident. She had a degree in cultural anthropology and was asked, “Can you also send emails?” Nine years later, she leverages her degree to turn emails into a relationship engine.

Her argument in this episode is that translation should be the first layer of accessibility, not a copy task handed off five minutes before launch. If someone cannot read your email, they ignore it. Ignored mail signals low engagement to mailbox providers, and that shows up in poor deliverability. 

From there, the conversation moves to the other considerations outside of language marketers need to be aware of. The date format that means two different things depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on. The logo that had to be redesigned because black is the color of bad luck in China. The wave of Florida cancellations that turned out to be a hurricane rather than a broken landing page. And the Arabic countdown timer that rendered backwards, because numbers run left to right while words run right to left.

Anna is equally clear about when not to translate emails. A rough translation costs more trust than no translation, and if the product only exists in English, English-only is a defensible choice. Her one fix, if she could change anything: stop treating language as something you infer from an IP address. Start treating it as a preference—sitting in the preference center alongside promotional and product updates, chosen by the subscriber.

What you’ll learn:

• Why an email nobody can read becomes a deliverability problem, and what image-only sends cost you on top of that
• The three technical approaches to multilingual email— segmentation, scripted, and dynamic—and the subject line problem that none of them fully solve
• When English-only is the right call, and why a rough translation damages trust more than no translation at all

For advice and resources to help you become a stronger sender, visit validity.com.