Introducing multilingual campaigns

A Lettr campaign can now send one email in several languages. The template holds every language version (English, German, and French, for example), the campaign targets one audience, and each contact receives the version that matches the language stored on their contact record. Nothing has to be enabled: a campaign is multilingual whenever its template has more than one language.

Who multilingual campaigns are for

Multilingual campaigns are for any audience that does not share one language. The feature fits three kinds of audience in particular.

• Countries with more than one language. A shop or service in Switzerland, Belgium, or Canada has one customer base that reads German, French, Dutch, or English. The customers already sit in one audience, and the newsletter can now be one campaign too.
• Products sold across borders. A product with users in several countries can send a release announcement or a newsletter to the whole user base at once, and each user reads it in their own language.
• Audiences with a language minority. A smaller group of German readers inside a mostly English audience no longer needs a campaign of its own. Adding German costs a translation of the text, and the campaign setup stays the same.

One campaign instead of one per language

Before this release, sending the same newsletter in two languages took a separate campaign for each language, and each campaign had its own template, its own segment filtered by language, and its own results page. Every extra language repeated the setup and split the reporting, and the results of one newsletter had to be added up by hand.

A multilingual campaign has one audience, one schedule, and one results page, with a table showing how many people received each language. The template works the same way: all language versions share one layout and only the text differs, so a design change is made once and applies to every language. The Multilingual Campaigns page shows the whole flow, with a live matcher for trying language values.

It works with the language data already in the audience

Language values in real audiences are inconsistent: one import writes de, another writes de_AT, and a signup form stores German. Lettr accepts all of these without a data cleanup. Matching ignores case and the choice between a hyphen and an underscore, drops the region where needed (de-AT matches a German template, and en matches en-GB), and recognizes common names such as german, Deutsch, or français.

The property that holds the language needs little setup. A property named language, lang, or locale is picked up automatically, so an audience imported from a CSV with a lang column works as it is, and any other string property can be marked as the communication language. The same flag can be set through the API when a property is created or updated, so a team that manages its audience schema from code can set up the language property in the same script.

Every contact still gets the email

With one campaign per language, a contact whose language field was empty or misspelled matched no segment and received nothing. In a multilingual campaign, a contact whose language is missing or unrecognized receives the primary language, so the send always covers the whole audience.

The fallback is visible before the send. Lettr shows how many contacts will get the primary language and why, with the unrecognized values listed, so a data gap can be fixed while it still matters. Segments also have new "is empty" and "is not empty" conditions, which makes the contacts without a language a one-condition segment.

The whole email is in the recipient's language

Everything the recipient sees follows their language: the content, the subject, the sender, and the automatic unsubscribe footer, which is translated for 19 languages (any other language gets the English footer). The "view in browser" link opens the language the recipient received, and the hosted unsubscribe and preferences pages open in that language too.

Each secondary language can have its own subject, from name, from email, and reply-to. An empty field inherits the primary value, so translating the subject alone is enough. A separate reply-to is useful when replies should reach people who speak the language, such as a German support inbox.

Safe to schedule ahead

A scheduled campaign sends exactly what was reviewed. Scheduling or starting a campaign stores a copy of the template's content in every language, and a template edited after that point does not affect the campaign. Work on the next issue can continue in the same template while the current one waits to send. Unscheduling removes the stored copy, so a rescheduled campaign picks up the current template again.

Each language version can also be sent as a test email first, with its own content, subject, and sender, and checked in a real inbox before the campaign goes out.

FAQ

Bottom line

A newsletter for a multilingual audience is one campaign: one template with several languages, one audience, one results page, and every contact receiving the version in their language. The free tier covers 500 contacts, which is enough to add a second language to a template and send a real multilingual campaign. Create a free Lettr account to try it. Once you're in, the multilingual campaigns docs walk through the setup with screenshots.