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International Sends

Table of contents
  1. 1. ExactTarget International Sends
    1. 1.1. You Choose the Encoding Standard for Your Email
      1. 1.1.1. Example
  2. 2. Procedures
    1. 2.1. How to Create an International Email
    2. 2.2. How to Change Email Encoding Settings
  3. 3. Best Practices for International Sends
    1. 3.1. Know Your Subscribers
      1. 3.1.1. Send Email in the Subscriber's Native Language
      2. 3.1.2. Use Surveys to Learn Each Subscriber's Language Preference 
      3. 3.1.3. Segment Your Lists Based on Language Preference
      4. 3.1.4. Create and Send a Separate Email Specific to Each Encoding
        1. 3.1.4.1. Example
    2. 3.2. Working with Non-ASCII Characters
      1. 3.2.1. Cutting and Pasting
      2. 3.2.2. Changing Keyboard Settings
      3. 3.2.3. Encourage Recipients to View as a Web Page
      4. 3.2.4. Learn and Follow International Spam laws
  4. 4. Known Challenges in International Sends
    1. 4.1. Challenges with Using Surveys 
    2. 4.2. Challenges with Subject lines
    3. 4.3. Non-ASCII character gaps
    4. 4.4. Inconsistencies in Email Services
  5. 5. Testing International Send Emails
    1. 5.1. Create an Effective Testing Plan
    2. 5.2. Selecting Testers
      1. 5.2.1. Internal Testers
      2. 5.2.2. Major Email Services
      3. 5.2.3. Trusted Customers
      4. 5.2.4. International Testers
      5. 5.2.5. Create Testing Lists
      6. 5.2.6. Emulate Your Subscriber's System
      7. 5.2.7. Common Issues to Test Against
  6. 6. Appendix A: A Brief History of the Unicode Standard and UTF-8 Encoding
    1. 6.1. The Need for Unicode
    2. 6.2. Unicode Issues
    3. 6.3. Unicode and UTF-8
    4. 6.4. Future Hopes
  7. 7. Appendix B: Configuring Your PC Language Settings
    1. 7.1. Setting up your PC to Handle another Language
    2. 7.2. Specifying a Language for Web Page Content
      1. 7.2.1. Manual- or Auto-Selecting Encodings
  8. 8. Appendix C: Configuring Your Macintosh Language Settings
      1. 8.1.1. Setting up your Macintosh to Handle another Language
      2. 8.1.2. Setting up Safari
      3. 8.1.3. Setting up Firefox
  9. 9. Definitions
    1. 9.1. ASCII
    2. 9.2. binary
    3. 9.3. bit
    4. 9.4. byte
    5. 9.5. double byte
    6. 9.6. single byte
    7. 9.7. character
    8. 9.8. character set
    9. 9.9. content header
    10. 9.10. deliverability
    11. 9.11. email header
    12. 9.12. encoding
    13. 9.13. HTML
    14. 9.14. mail server
    15. 9.15. MIME
    16. 9.16. mojibake
    17. 9.17. plain text
    18. 9.18. readability
    19. 9.19. render
    20. 9.20. Target language
    21. 9.21. Unicode
    22. 9.22. UTF-8

Today's international marketplace calls for us to reach audiences around the globe. If you have subscribers in Japan, then emails in English are unlikely to be your best mechanism to reach them. This raises many questions. Even if you can produce emails in German, will the German email server allow your email to be delivered? If your Thai email is delivered, will the Thai PC know how to display your email message to the screen? If your Russian email is delivered and displays correctly, what happens when that subscriber clicks the Profile Center link? ExactTarget addresses these concerns with our International Sends feature, which can help you to achieve your best possible email deliverability, readability, and functionality in non-English markets.

It is recommended that you use the Unicode UTF-8 language encoding for all your international emails (more information on how encoding works and how to encode your emails follows). Unicode UTF-8 formatting is by far the most widely accepted and most forgiving encoding available outside the U.S.

However, Unicode UTF-8 encoding is not always the best encoding to use. There are large areas of world population where a local language encoding is preferred or where Unicode UTF-8 encoding is not accepted. When you become aware of those situations in your subscriber base, our International Sends feature allows you to choose the better encoding to give your message the best chance to be delivered and read by your subscribers. 

ExactTarget International Sends

ExactTarget's International Sends feature allows you to select the specific language encoding for your email and provides pre-translated supporting pages for your subscribers. Not only will your emails have the best possible chance of being received and rendering correctly, but the standard ExactTarget landing pages will automatically appear to your subscribers in the subscriber's preferred language.

You Choose the Encoding Standard for Your Email

When ExactTarget International Sends is enabled for your account, you must choose the encoding setting as you create each email. You can change the encoding selection for any existing emails (they default to US-ASCII encoding). We recommend Unicode UTF-8 for most international audiences, but it may be more appropriate to select a specific, local language encoding for all or a portion of your subscribers.
Using the correct encoding is critical because it simultaneously improves your email's chance of being delivered successfully and improves the ability of the subscriber's PC to display the characters correctly. 

Example

When reviewing your email tracking results, you see that your English emails have been successful in Europe, but have high bounce rates and low open and click rates in China. This is not a surprise because most PCs in China are configured only for Chinese and may not display English well. 

You decide to have your emails translated into Chinese by a localization service. Then, using ExactTarget, you send the English emails (with Unicode UTF-8 encoding) to your European subscribers and the Chinese emails (with Chinese Big-5 encoding) to your Chinese subscribers. 

As a result, the delivery, open, and click rates all increase for the Chinese emails. The Chinese email servers were expecting Chinese encoding, so your Chinese-encoded email looked less like spam. The Chinese PCs could easily decode Chinese encoded text, so the emails displayed properly. 

The following language encodings are supported by ExactTarget:

  • Big5 - Chinese (Traditional)
  • EUC-KR  - Korean
  • GB2312 - Chinese (Simplified)
  • ISO-8859-1 - Western European: Danish, Dutch (partial), English, Faeroese, Finnish (partial), French (partial), German, Icelandic,Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, and Swedish. Also: Albanian, Indonesian, Afrikaans and Swahili.
  • ISO-8859-2 - Central European: Bosnian, Polish, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Hungarian.
  • ISO-2022-JP - Japanese
  • KOI8-R - Russian, Bulgarian
  • Shift-JIS - Japanese
  • UTF-8 (Unicode) - Most languages, gaining universal acceptance in most areas of the world
  • US-ASCII - English: United States (ExactTarget default for non-International emails)

Automatically Translated Landing Pages

In addition to encoding emails, the International Sends feature provides translated versions of the standard landing pages:

  • Profile Center
  • Subscription Center
  • Unsubscribe Confirmation
  • Forward to a Friend

These pages have been translated into 21 languages. The language that appears when a subscriber visits the landing pages depends on the language preference the subscriber has set in the browser, even if that language is different than the email language). 

Pre-translated landing pages are available in the following languages:

  • Chinese
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish   

Example
Your subscriber in France has her web browser configured to prefer French language for web pages. When she clicks the Profile Center link in your email, we send her to the French version of her Profile Center. 

The following screenshots are examples of landing pages in the subscriber's language. 

The ExactTarget Profile Center page displayed in Spanish

InternationalSends1.PNG

The ExactTarget Subscription Center page displayed in Japanese

InternationalSends2.PNG

Note that attribute names and values are not translated on the landing pages. For example, the attribute names Full Name and Email Address appear in English. Likewise, the actual field values can only be saved as English text and appear here as English text, as well. There is limited support for some Western European characters. We highly recommend that you extensively test this feature with your live data.

Automatically Translated Forward-to-a-Friend Messages

When a subscriber clicks a forward-to-a-friend link in your email, a forward-to-a-friend landing page appears in the language indicated in the subscriber's browser preferences. When the subscriber completes and submits the forward-to-a-friend form, the system forwards the message to the email address the subscriber provided.

The message that the friend receives contains an introduction, a personal message, and the body of the message being forwarded:

  • The introduction explains who forwarded the email and contains a link to opt-in to the mailing list. The introduction appears in the same language as the forward-to-a-friend landing page it was sent from.
  • The personal message is the text that the subscriber entered when filling out the forward-to-a-friend form. The personal message appears in the language the subscriber wrote it. 
  • The body of the forwarded message is the same as the message the subscriber originally received. It appears in the original language, even if the email is in a different language than the forward-to-a-friend landing page.

English-language email forwarded through a Spanish forward-to-a-friend page

InternationalSends3.PNG

Procedures

This guide assumes you are familiar with creating and sending emails in ExactTarget. There are only a few differences between creating and maintaining emails with special character encoding as opposed to those with the standard encoding, but those differences are critical. Most importantly, you must select the language encoding of your email at the time of creation, and you can change that encoding at any time.

How to Create an International Email

Use these steps to create a blank template-based email for use with another language:

  1. Click the Content tab from the navigation bar
  2. Click my emails.
  3. Click Create from the toolbar. 
  4. Select the email creation method. Choices include: 
  • Build from Existing Template: select to create a new email from an existing template
  • Build from HTML: select to paste HTML text for the email message body
  • Revise Existing Email: select to create a new copy of an existing email
  1. Click Select Template.
  2. Enter the email name (not visible to subscribers).
  3. Enter the Email Subject Line. This should be short, meaningful and in your subscribers' preferred language. Enter the text by typing (if you can) or pasting it directly in the appropriate language.
  4. Click Select Folder to select a folder in which to store this email.
  5. Select the character encoding that best corresponds to your intended subscribers from the Target Language dropdown.
    Note: To minimize mail server decoding difficulties, ExactTarget recommends that you use Unicode (UTF-8) unless your testing identifies problems; in that case, specify your subscribers' local language rather than Unicode (UTF-8).
  6. Click Next to open the edit HTML version page, and begin editing your email content areas.
  7. Click Create on the desired content area to add text copy in your new email. Typically, text in the email should be in your subscribers' preferred language. Enter the text by typing (if you can) or pasting it directly in the appropriate language for the email message body.

How to Change Email Encoding Settings

To change the encoding settings for an email, follow these steps:

  1. Click the Content tab from the navigation bar.
  2. Click my emails. 
  3. Select the checkbox next to the email to change.
  4. Click the Properties button.
    The Email Properties window appears.
  5. Select the language encoding from the Language dropdown.
  6. Click OK.

Best Practices for International Sends

In all areas of email marketing some business practices are more effective than others to reach your subscriber. The following best practices will help you to account for these differences as you create your international sends process. 

Know Your Subscribers

You have a better chance to connect with your subscriber when you send specific, targeted, and relevant emails. Consider how you can build relationships with your subscriber so that you can send the "right" email. 

Send Email in the Subscriber's Native Language

Your message is best communicated in the recipient's native language. In almost all situations, open rates, click rates, and conversion rates are highest for these emails. It is worth your time to find and use your subscribers' language preferences.

Investigate your subscriber base. Where did your lists come from? Where are your subscribers located? What can you assume about their language preferences? You can often determine quite a bit about your subscriber lists by asking this type of simple question.

However, it may be faster to ask the subscribers directly.

Use Surveys to Learn Each Subscriber's Language Preference 

Consider sending a simple survey to your subscribers to discover their preferred language. The survey should be as simple as possible; we recommend a single question with a list of radio-button language options for them to select. You can design the survey to populate their answers into the desired attribute fields. 

Segment Your Lists Based on Language Preference

After you have your subscribers' language preference as an attribute, you can segment your lists into groups based on language. You can use these groups to send emails in the specified language to each group of subscribers, for example, send Japanese emails only to those who prefer Japanese.

To create a group based on an attribute, do this:

  1. Click the Subscribers tab from the navigation bar
  2. Click my groups.
  3. Click Create Group from the toolbar to start the wizard, and click Next.
  4. Select Build a rule based on profiles and preferences and click Next.
  5. Complete the Build Rule page and click Next. 
  6. Specify the name of the group and where it will reside then click Create.
    If necessary, create a new subscriber group folder by clicking New, then click OK.
  7. Click Finish.

Create and Send a Separate Email Specific to Each Encoding

Each email you create can use only one language encoding, for example Japanese or Chinese but not both. Therefore, it is important that your emails and groups are designed so that your emails are sent only to subscriber groups who are in geographical areas where they are likely to accept the encoding you have assigned.

When you send an email, the application creates an email header. The email header contains the From information (name and email address), To information, date the email was sent, subject line of the message, and other information relating to the sending of the message. The email header is encoded with the same character encoding you use for the body of the email.  To the greatest extent possible, you should use email header information that is in the same language as the body of the email. You can create a language-specific subject line and different sender profile for each language to have the best opportunity for your email header information to display correctly.

Note: ExactTarget does not recommend using non-ASCII characters in your From information and subject line for emails you send using the send wizard.

Example

You need to send product information to subscribers in the U.S. and Japan. The email you've designed has marketing information in English and technical specifications in Japanese. When you test your email with Unicode encoding, your Japanese testers can't see the Japanese characters. When you test your email with Japanese encoding, your U.S. testers have trouble reading the email, if they even receive it (foreign encoded emails looks like spam in the U.S.) 

So, you redesign the email into two emails: one in English, another in Japanese. Each email is encoding uniquely and sent to the appropriate subscribers. Everyone receives what they need and can easily read all the text.

Create Different Content Headers and Footers for Each Language

The content header and footer sections should reflect what you know about your subscriber.

We recommend that you create language specific content headers and footers for all your international emails. You can manage these headers in the following ways:

  • If you create a send definition for your email sends, you can choose the content header and footer to use as part of the Delivery Profile. 
  • You can use the HTML Paste method to create your emails, which bypasses automatic content headers and footers. 
  • You can use space in your template to put content header and footer text directly into your templated email. You'll need to ask ExactTarget to turn off the automatic content headers and footers for your account, so you must create content headers and footers for all emails in your account. 
  • You can contact ExactTarget Customer Support or your ExactTarget account manager to request changes or discuss other options. We can help you with many alternatives, but customized options often take time to implement and may include additional fees.

Note: Not all non-ASCII characters are supported in ExactTarget footers, such as double-byte characters like Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Russian. In these instances, you should choose an option which allows you to include the text within the body of the email. 

Working with Non-ASCII Characters

You may find new challenges when trying to create email content in a different language. You'll most likely need to create your content by typing in the foreign characters (if you can configure your keyboard to do it) or you'll need to copy and paste foreign language characters directly into the email message body.

Cutting and Pasting

You might be provided any needed non-English text from an external source, such as your marketing team. In that situation, you can simply cut the text from your source and paste it into your email content areas. 

To minimize possible character corruption, we suggest that you do not edit your foreign language text within the ExactTarget editor. Instead:

  • Keep a separate text copy, saving it with UTF-8 encoding.
  • Edit your copy in a text editor.
  • Save changes on your computer under a different name each time.
  • Paste the edited copy directly in ExactTarget.

Changing Keyboard Settings

When your desired language is not supported within standard ASCII character set, you have the option to change your keyboard layout so that you can type in another character set. This is a good idea if you will be creating documents in that language on a regular basis. However, this technique requires additional software outside what ExactTarget can provide or support. Once you have obtained the required software, you will need to refer to the purchased software manuals and your computer's system manual to learn how to configure and use these tools.

Encourage Recipients to View as a Web Page

We recommend that you encourage your subscribers to View as a Web Page. Virtually all of the concerns and issues with email rending via language encoding disappear when viewing the content via an Internet browsers.

We recommend that you always provide the standard ExactTarget Click here to view as a web page link in your emails. We also recommend that you include additional links in the body of the email and that you actively mention and encourage use of those links. An example might be phrased like, "If you experience any problems viewing this email, click this link to be taken to a web version."

Learn and Follow International Spam laws

ExactTarget software is designed to help you comply with U.S. spam laws. We believe in our business practices and believe they are valid around the world. However, we cannot guarantee that our system, emails, or business practices are legal in other countries. We strongly recommend that you seek legal counsel on a country by country basis.

Known Challenges in International Sends

The ExactTarget International Sends feature offers comprehensive encoding options and specific pre-translated landing pages. However, there are always limitations. Please note these areas which are known to represent challenges:

Challenges with Using Surveys 

Because of the complexities of encodings used in the transmission of survey data, surveys present unique challenges in international sends. A large portion of email clients cannot correctly transmit non-English text data in a way we can collect and report that data for you. Based on this and other concerns, ExactTarget strongly encourages you to follow these guidelines: 

  • Make survey questions short as possible (always a good idea)
  • Use radio button or True/False answer types only
  • Avoid personalizing the survey with subscriber data (first name, last name, etc.)
  • Never request written responses via the survey

In our testing, the above guidelines should allow you to successfully collect information from international subscribers. As always, please test any surveys extensively before sending to live subscribers.

Challenges with Subject lines

We always recommend using the subject line to make your emails inviting and familiar. The subject line is a great place to add personalization to your international sends and can make an especially meaningful impression when in the subscriber's native language. 

While ExactTarget accepts virtually any characters pasted or typed into the subject line of our emails, there are concerns. 

  • There are large email services that ignore language encoding when rendering subject lines, such as Yahoo! 
  • If your language encoding is wrong, the better email services can figure it out from text in the body of the email. But even the best email service will not render your subject line correctly if you choose the wrong encoding.
  • Even if the recipient's email server accepts the encoding, the email client may not render the subject line correctly.

Since most of the issues with subject lines are specific to the recipient's service provider or email client software, they are difficult to track or anticipate. We strongly recommend that you test extensively across many servers and clients before you send an email with non-ASCII characters in the subject line. 

Non-ASCII character gaps

Due to the very nature of character encoding, the process only works when the characters you are using are all anticipated and translated. There are some characters that are not supported in certain places for different reasons. This is a big reason why we encourage you to test extensively across different situations. We also provide the following known gaps in character support:

  • Cannot use most non-ASCII characters in standard ExactTarget attributes, so you should create your lists using data extensions.
  • Cannot use any non-ASCII characters in email addresses
  • Cannot use some special business characters in Asian language sets, such as ®, ©, and ¢ 
  • Cannot use the Euro symbol in many language sets, even European (be sure to test)
  • Cannot use some characters in certain encodings, for example, Not all Russian characters are supported in the Russian encoding KOI8-R (be sure to test)

Inconsistencies in Email Services

Every private email server at each company, in each region, and in each city and town can all handle your emails differently. Likewise, despite the wide use and popularity of major email services, such as Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and so forth, they each handle emails very differently. All this can be an inconvenience to domestic emails but represents a definite challenge to designing and deploying effective emails in non-English languages. 

Below are some candid observations for your consideration. Unfortunately, these services change constantly so please verify specific behaviors independently.

  • Yahoo! and Yahoo! Japan ignore subject line encoding entirely but will display correctly in the body of the email, even if you choose the wrong encoding.
  • Gmail converts double byte characters to their decimal equivalents in the body of emails. Subject lines can handle most characters, but only if the email is encoded correctly.
  • Most smaller local service providers give their customers web-based email viewers. These viewers tend to be overly simplified and typically ignore subject line encoding and may ignore all language encoding entirely.
  • While each business configures their email servers uniquely, some generalities can be observed. Most business email servers allow and handle encoded language characters well in the body of the email, even if the wrong encoding is used. Subject lines can typically handle most characters, but only if the email is encoded correctly.

Testing International Send Emails

We cannot overemphasize the importance of testing your international emails before sending to subscribers. Due to the fragile nature of language encoding, your message can become lost or garbled at many of the points between you and your subscribers. The only way to be reasonably confident that your email will work is to perform extensive and effective live testing.

Create an Effective Testing Plan

Sending yourself your international email is a great way to see how that email will perform on your PC, but it's not enough to know how it will perform in real situations. You need to develop a testing plan that reasonably recreates the same challenges and contingencies that your live emails will experience. The more realistic your test sends, the more effective your results will be.

We recommend at least the following actions to test international send emails:

  • Send yourself the email to test how well it delivers and renders.
  • Send the email to very carefully selected individuals who are willing to test for you (discussed in more detail below).
  • Send the email to various email services such as Yahoo! and Gmail.
  • Send the email to a local tester physically in and familiar with the region, if possible.

Selecting Testers

Most people solicit help in testing emails to lessen the load. We recommend that you recruit testers to cover a broad range of email delivery and display options. Regardless of your relationship with the tester, always be sure to communicate your expectations of them very clearly up front.

Internal Testers

Co-workers are usually a good first choice for getting help with testing your emails. Try to select people with different machines and even different email servers and networks, if possible. Make sure his or her boss is OK with the extra duties.

Major Email Services

We also recommend that you test by sending your email to as many major email services as possible, such as Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail, and Hotmail. You can usually create free accounts at these services yourself, or you may have friends or co-workers that can give you access. These services are important because they typically represent a large portion of your subscribers and they each filter, decode, and render emails differently.

Trusted Customers

In addition to testing internally, you might also consider asking one or more of your good customers to help you test. This can be a little tricky, so it's not encouraged, but in some situations it works well for everyone involved. Be sure to communicate very clearly up front all expectations and choose testers wisely.

International Testers

If you have access to friends, co-workers, or trusted customers internationally, they can be especially valuable testing resources. Testing your Italian email across Italian email servers to an Italian email address and on a PC configured to read Italian is the best possible testing scenario because it is closest to real life. As with any other group, choose your international testers carefully and be sure to clearly communicate your needs and expectations up front.

Create Testing Lists

It is recommended that you create lists specifically for testing. Many find it useful to create a test list containing just their own email address to send single tests to themselves all throughout the process. You may find value in creating many different test lists for different situations, such as one for internal testers, one for external testers, one for Macintosh testers, and one for large email services.

Emulate Your Subscriber's System

We strongly recommended that you install regional language support and configure web browser language preferences on your PC so that you can test your emails to verify that they render correctly in the target language. In other words, load Japanese characters support on your PC before you send yourself an email in Japanese. This will allow you to see the characters and confirm the email is working. You can also view the Profile Center and other landing pages in any of the supported languages simply by setting your PC to prefer that language for web pages. You can find very detailed instructions on how to do all of this for a PC in Appendix B and for a Macintosh in Appendix C.

Common Issues to Test Against

Always be sure that you and your testers carefully review the entire test email for any issues--from spelling errors to content ambiguities to formatting issues. For international emails, we recommend that you pay particular attention to the following sections of test emails:

  • Email subject line
  • Rendering of all non-ASCII characters 
  • Business characters (ex: ®, ©, ¢, all money symbols but Euro symbol in particular)
  • Content headers and footers, particularly those that include double-byte characters
  • Surveys
  • All links, particularly the required Profile Center link

Appendix A: A Brief History of the Unicode Standard and UTF-8 Encoding

Most of us probably don't think much about it, but computers don't really speak our language--that is, as we do. Rather, they interpret it by means of digital signals (codes) that they can understand (bytes and bits). This process leads to effective communication between the computer and its user. However, certain factors can complicate this process, producing some unforeseen results, as explained here.

  • Operating Systems

Computers were originally designed for Latin alphabets and various symbols, having signals and code equivalents that the computer interprets. As differing operating systems evolved, the design extended to accommodate even more characters with new proprietary codes to meet that need. This can create a problem when moving documents between differing operating systems such as Windows and Mac or UNIX.

  • Global Communications

With the growth of the Internet, it's become increasingly necessary to communicate in different languages--creating a need for the development of more sophisticated character encoding. 

  • Non-Latin Alphabets

The Latin standard is based on bytes and bits and is limited by its assortment of 8-bit fonts and 256 characters (known as ASCII and ANSI). Because of this, some overlap can occur, where the same character can represent a different character in a different language.

The result? Pain points, such as incompatibilities in code that produce unintelligible characters to end users. 

The Need for Unicode

To overcome the aforementioned incompatibilities, a coding standard is clearly needed, and the development of Unicode is the ambitious, ongoing attempt to do so. It is a superset of all other character set standards and is intended for differing operating systems, alphabets, and symbols. Key to this solution is the use of unique identifiers, thereby transcending bytes and bits along with the ASCII and ANSI limitations of 256 characters. It does this with strings of code points; so with the assignment of new strings, it evolves into a larger, more accommodating system.

At this point, Unicode character encoding includes nearly 100,000 unique identifiers--discrete points of reference which map language-specific characters that include most written languages and copious symbols.
With this character-encoding standard, computers can consistently represent text written in any language so they can display correctly for your recipient.

Unicode Issues

While Unicode addresses and satisfies many needs, it also has its limitations, including the following:

  • It does not maximize backwards compatibility with ASCII
  • It has cumbersome strings of code points
  • Not all countries and zones use it as a standard

Until Unicode is completely accepted as a standard, some mail servers are unable to decode Unicode characters, causing you and your recipients to experience instances of SPAM or gobbledygook--ugly emails.

Unicode and UTF-8

UTF-8 was developed as a multibyte, variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It can represent any character in the Unicode standard. Its more obvious benefits include the following:

  • It is the preferred encoding standard for email
  • It maximizes backwards compatibility with ASCII, thereby requiring no conversion for existing ASCII text
  • Its multibyte encoding makes it more efficient 

As a result, UTF-8 provides a more robust solution for international sends.

Future Hopes

Especially when it's used in conjunction with UTF-8, Unicode is gaining more general acceptance with the goal of becoming the ubiquitous standard. 

Appendix B: Configuring Your PC Language Settings

Sending emails internationally sometimes takes a bit of additional preparatory steps, described in the following sections.

Setting up your PC to Handle another Language

To send international emails, your other language must be installed on your computer. Once you set up regional and language options, your email client (for these examples, Microsoft® Office Outlook®) looks to those settings and displays them correctly.

To install languages in Microsoft Windows ©, do this (other operating systems will be slightly different):

  1. Choose Control Panel from Start and select Regional and Language Options, as shown:

InternationalSends4.PNG

  1. Click Details to select keyboard language settings.
  2. Click checkboxes to ensure all languages are installed, as shown from the Languages tab:
    InternationalSends5.PNG
    Note: You may be prompted for your OS Install CD while in this process; so it's a good idea to have it handy.
  3. Set the locale from Regional Options tab to set the formatting options for numbers, dates, currency, etc. Do not change the information in the Location textbox.
  4. Click Apply; then click OK.
     

Specifying a Language for Web Page Content

You can control which of the available languages your PC will prefer for web pages. This comes in handy when testing your ExactTarget landing pages for international use. If you'd like to see what your Italian subscribers will see when they click on any Subscription Center link from ExactTarget, simply change your Internet Browser to prefer Italian. 

Note: The landing page displays in English when a subscriber's browser is set to a language that isn't supported.

To specify another language for web page content (shown with IE6), do this:

1. Click Internet Options from Tools on your browser menubar, as shown:

InternationalSends6.PNG

2. Select Languages from Internet Options page, as shown in step 1.

3. Add the language that corresponds to your subscribers for your international send, as shown in the following screenshot.

InternationalSends7.PNG

4. Click OK on each: Add Language, Language Preference, and then Internet Options dialogs.

Note: You can prioritize the languages by moving them up or down. When a website appears in multiple languages, it appears in the language with the highest priority.

Manual- or Auto-Selecting Encodings

Usually, your web pages contain information describing the language encoding and character set. You can use Auto Select to detect the language of your web page if that information is missing. Alternatively, you can manually select the language encoding for the page in the case that Auto Select is unable to detect the language.

You have the option to auto-select or manually select an encoding.

To auto-select or manually select an encoding to correctly display encoded web pages, click Auto-Select or More from Encoding in View on the menubar (shown in IE6).

InternationalSends8.PNG

When Auto-Select fails to correctly display your web page, and if you know the language that the encoding should be, you can manually select a language encoding by selecting More. In the case that your language is not on the list, you can select User Defined to include more languages. 

When you use Encoding from View, you may also be prompted to download the appropriate language support components.

Appendix C: Configuring Your Macintosh Language Settings

While the Macintosh operating system supports most languages, some may have too many characters. For those languages, it may be necessary for you to set an input method. The method you choose determines the characters that appear when you type. In the case that your preferred language is unavailable, you may need to install a third-party input method.

Setting up your Macintosh to Handle another Language

To set up your system preferences so that you can use another language, do this:

1. Click International in the Personal section of System Preferences from the Apple on your menubar, as shown:

InternationalSends9.PNG

2. Click the checkbox by the input method you wish from the Input Menu tab, as shown:

InternationalSends10.PNG

3. Select other input options, if desired, as shown in step 2.

4. Open the application (that supports this language) for your other-language writing.

From Get Info, you can see what languages your application supports, under Languages, as shown:

InternationalSends11.PNG

5. Click Input in the menubar, choose your preferred input method, and type.

Setting up Safari

To set up your browser (Safari is shown) with specific encoding, do this:

Note: Before you set up your browser, be sure to set your preferred language using International Preferences, as previously discussed.

1. Select the Appearance menu item in Preferences from Safari, as shown:

InternationalSends12.PNG

2. Select your other language from Default Encoding dropdown, as shown in step 1.

3. Close the Appearance dialog.

Setting up Firefox

To set up your browser (Firefox is shown) with specific encoding, do this:

Note: Before you set up your browser, be sure to set your preferred language using International Preferences, as previously discussed.

1. Click Options from the Tools menubar to open Options, as shown:

InternationalSends13.PNG

2. Click Choose from the Languages section under the Advanced tab, as shown in step 1.

3. Select your preferred language from the Languages dialog as shown in step 1.

4. Click Ok.
 

Definitions

These definitions are relevant to the context of this guide.

ASCII

a code to represent English as plain text for computers—7 binary bits = 1 character. The first 127 ASCII characters are interchangeable in Unicode; characters between 128-255 are High, or Extended ASCII. (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

binary

consists of 2 mutually exclusive, unique numbers, 0 (off) & 1 (on). ASCII code is binary, as opposed to MIME.

bit

a unit of measurement for computer memory—1 bit = a single character

byte

a unit of measurement for computer memory—8 bits = 1 byte

double byte

Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) are syllabic language—each syllable = a double byte in computer memory 

single byte

each letter = a single byte in computer memory—English is an alphabetic, single-byte language

character

a unique numeric sequence that represents a unit of textual information 

character set

a code page that relates to a specific encoding table

content header

the top of the content of your message. If you use templates to create your email messages, the header is defined in the template.

deliverability

email successfully reaching its destination—your subscriber. Unsuccessful email either goes to SPAM or fails to deliver.

email header

the From information (name and email address), To information, date the email was sent, subject line of the message, and other information relating to the sending of the message

encoding

a standard to consistently display information (in this guide, non-English text) by means of mail servers

HTML

the ASCII-compatible language used to produce documents on browsers (Hypertext Markup Language)

mail server

a virtual post office that delivers according to user-definable rules

MIME

a standard supporting text in other than ASCII & multipart messages, (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

mojibake

screen garbage resulting from incorrectly encoded characters (borrowed from Japanese)

plain text

textual data in (ASCII-compatible)

readability

successful rendering of your email—it looks the same to your subscriber as that which you sent (see Rendering).

render

how data displays on a browser (see Readability).

Target language

an option for an encoding standard you select to label & route your email—used to specify a region when Unicode fails

Unicode

a standard to represent characters—16 bits = 1 character. The first 128 ASCII characters are Unicode-compatible. 

UTF-8

an 8-bit, variable-width encoding, which maximizes compatibility with ASCII 

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