Siebel Marketing User Guide > Creating and Using Offers > Creating and Modifying Offers - Basic Steps >

Applying Globalization Rules to Offers

Each offer record contains a locale value. The locale is used to locate and display the localized landing page for response forms. When you create an email offer record, the locale value defaults to the value set in your profile. You can change the value to match your business needs. When you launch the campaign, the locale assigned to the email offer will be used for all recipients.

The default character set for emails is UTF-8. This is the value set in the Charset attribute for the email's Content-Type header. If you wish to change the Charset attribute, you need to select an Email Marketing Server profile with the correct Charset attribute or request a System Administrator to make the changes necessary to the Email Marketing Server profile that you use.

NOTE:  Internally, templates are maintained using the UTF-8 character set. Therefore, the character set should be able to represent characters for any written language.

The character set for the template you upload should be the default character set configured for the operating system you are using (the current code page on Windows or UTF-8 on UNIX). On UNIX platforms, an environment variable (SIEBEL_FILE_ENCODING) can be assigned to a character set to use in place of UTF-8 when reading templates. If the original template file contains a BOM (Byte Order Mark), the character set of the template file will be automatically detected. This automatic detection is useful when the character set differs from the platform default character set.

CAUTION:  Be careful when using a character set for outgoing email that differs from the platform default character set or UTF-8. If the Email Marketing Server character set is not compatible with the character set of the original template file that is read from disk), the resulting email text might be unreadable.

For instructions about how to assign the correct character set to an email campaign, see Assigning Character Sets for the Email Marketing Server.