Setting Up Locales For Your Project

Want an easy way to manage your localized content? With Iterable's locales feature, you can take advantage of shared templates while also enabling your marketing teams to work on content for multiple regions and languages. (Now that's what we call having your cake and eating it too! 🍰)

Before you can start creating multiple locale versions of a template, you'll need to set up the locales you want to use on your Project Settings page.

# Setting up the locale user profile field

Iterable uses a field called locale to match each user's location and language preferences to the right localized version of a template. If you name this field something else (like languagePreference), Iterable won't be able to send the right template to each of your users. Talk to your Iterable customer success manager to make sure you have this set up correctly.

# Creating a new locale

Click the Add new locale button on your Project Settings page to set up a new locale or locales.

# Naming your locales

We recommend using standard ISO codes to name your locales. Creating two- or four-letter locale codes with the ISO-639 language codes and ISO-3166 country codes works well for many Iterable customers. But Iterable also supports alternative locale naming conventions like three-letter codes — the important thing to remember is that the locale codes you set up in your project settings map to what your customers will have in the locale field on their user profile!

As you're deciding what to call your locales, make sure to consider not just what your business looks like right now, but also how it may grow in the future. Maybe you only serve one region/language right now, but what happens if you expand globally in the next few years? For example, let's say you currently only operate in Canada, and you want to localize your content for English and French speakers. You might create two locales and call them en (English) and fr (French).

But what happens if your business expands to Europe next year? Not only are the dialects of English and French different between North America and Europe, but so are privacy laws and regulations. How will you distinguish between the French-language templates you've localized for North America and Europe if you only have one French locale called fr?

If you operate in more than one region (or think you may in the future), you might want to give your locales four-character names like this:

• French (Canada): fr-CA
• French (France): fr-FR

By denoting both the language and country, you'll be able to create more tailored content that accounts for different regional dialects and country-specific privacy laws and regulations. (For example, your brand's terms of service may need to be translated into more than one language as well as worded differently according to geographic region.)

# Choosing a default locale for your project

Your project's default locale should be the locale you use the most. Each time you create a new template, it will be associated with your project's default locale. If you have multiple localized versions of a template, Iterable will display the version for your project's default locale on your Campaigns page.

The first time you create a locale, Iterable will automatically assign it to be your project's default locale. If you want to change this, it's a good idea to do so when you're first setting up your project, as changing your default locale will affect previously-built campaigns.

Your default locale will also be used as a fallback when a user's location and/ or language preference is unknown. When a user has no locale field on their user profile, Iterable will send them the default localization of the campaign.

# Handling unsupported user locales

In the Locale Overrides section of your Project Settings page, you can tell Iterable whether or not to send marketing and transactional messages to users when the locale field on their user profile doesn't match any of the locales you've set up for a campaign. When these boxes are checked, Iterable will send the default localization of the campaign to any users whose locale is unsupported. When these boxes are unchecked, Iterable won't send the campaign to users whose locale is unsupported.

# Deleting a locale

Locales can't be edited or renamed once they've been created. If you need to make changes to a locale, you'll need to delete it and create a new one.

You can delete locales from your Project Settings page. Find the locale you want to delete, hover over it with your mouse, and click the trash can icon that appears.

When you delete a locale, you will no longer see the versions associated with that locale in your templates and campaigns. The content isn't deleted, but the locale won't show up in the template editor, and Iterable won't use this locale when it sends a campaign. Depending on your Locale overrides settings, the next time you send a campaign, customers who have a deleted locale on their user profile will either not receive the campaign or will receive the version of the campaign that corresponds to your project's default locale.