In the digital era, your website’s effectiveness depends on how willing you are to attract new customers. Many customers might use your website as their first point of contact with your business. Getting things right is important when securing a sale, building long-term relationships, and increasing brand loyalty.
However, remember that your only concern shouldn’t be to make your website user-friendly, but to pay close attention to personalizing the customer experience. Globalization and cross-border e-commerce are changing, so your website should follow the same path.
Multilingual websites can benefit your business from a competitive perspective and in this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about how a multilingual website can boost your revenues.
You can reach an international audience
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A multi-language e-commerce site helps you widen your reach and contact a global audience. 59% of online content is in English and ranked second is Russian, which holds 5% of web content.
Consider that even if your audience speaks some level of English, they feel more comfortable converting it into their native language. The problem is that when a visitor doesn’t understand the language and can’t translate it, they most likely won’t make a purchase since it raises uncertainty.
Even if you are running an online local store, it’s not a surprise if there is another widely spoken language. For example, In the United States, the second largest spoken language is Spanish. In Turkey, it’s Kurdish, and there are even countries that have more than 10 local languages.
The power of transcription services
Transcription services are great for offering subtitles in different languages on your website. Mostly when you are displaying a video, and it’s very important to make sure everyone watching the video understands what message you are trying to get through.
In this case, let’s take an example: if you are running an online store and targeting American citizens, you know that the second largest spoken language is Spanish and this would mean that you need to offer services in Spanish as well.
If you are displaying a video on your channel, you’d need to translate Spanish to English audio. You can do this by uploading your audio file, selecting the language the transcription software supports, transcribing it, and choosing if it’s going to be human, or machine-generated.
Human-made transcriptions are more accurate, but keep in mind that they take longer to complete. The AI is faster, but the accuracy rate will usually be around 80%.
Reduces bounce rates
72% of online shoppers buy from websites that are offered in their native language, or have the translation options they are looking for. Considering that, 87% of customers also claimed that they wouldn’t buy from a website only offered in English.
Therefore, all sites offered in many languages tend to reduce bounce rates and affect your conversion rates. This not only improves how you interact with customers but will make them more thankful towards you since you are personalizing their experience, offering them services in their native language.
Increased Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you aren’t too familiar with SEO, you need to know one thing and that is the fact that the online success of your e-commerce business will highly depend on your search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher you are ranked on a search engine page ranking, the more likely consumers are going to visit you.
However, the real question is how can you rank high on a search engine result page when you want to attract foreign customers who browse in different languages? Once your site is entirely translated, make sure you have also translated the metadata.
After you’re all done with that, your website will be better structured and easy for search engine bots to rank you higher on the result pages. Maybe it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s not as hard as you may think. After you finish the process, you’ll understand that it was all worth it.
Cost-effective
In the modern digital world we live in, a company’s website is usually considered as its main tool for generating revenue. What’s even more important to know is that your website shows how well you can market your product and services, and how much reach you get.
Using traditional marketing practices is not reliable anymore and considering you are using a multilingual website, it’s more understandable to say that you are now building up an international marketing audience.
Moreover, let’s not forget about analytics. While you are creating your marketing strategy, you need to use the power of data insights to help you better set up your targeted campaigns, providing you with a better understanding of the customer’s purchasing behaviors and demographics.
The analytics-driven approach reduces costs, and let’s not forget that data insights are even more important to gather when reaching an international audience.
Something to keep in mind is that each audience has different purchasing behaviors.
Improved brand reputation
Let’s face it, one of the best brands in the world first started their businesses locally and expanded internationally over time. Business reputation is built largely on what kind of impression you leave on your customers, and the truth is that having a multilingual site seems like a great first impression for everyone.
Many sites don’t have this and it’s a competitive advantage for you to do so. A multilingual website means that you are showing proof that you run a global business, which reflects quality and professionalism.
Also, let’s not forget how important brand reputation is when it comes to increasing revenue. It not only helps you differentiate from competitors, but is one of the key factors for attracting new customers.
Offers a customer-centric approach
Multilingual sites are considered to offer a high level of personalization and this is directly linked to securing sales and customers. 44% of internet users in Europe feel like they are missing important information when they see that the website they are trying to purchase on isn’t in their native language.
Providing quality information and descriptive texts in a customer’s native language on the product they are trying to buy shows how appreciative you are towards them. This approach makes them show appreciation and increases commercial success.
A Few steps to follow for making your e-commerce website multilingual
A major innovation many e-commerce businesses need to undertake is to overcome the challenges and difficulties of making a site multilingual. Business owners aren’t wrong about it, it definitely isn’t that easy to make your site in many languages.
However, there is a lot of softwares today that makes the process much easier and do the work for you. Some simple steps you can undertake to do so are:
- Create the language selection button: The first thing your visitors need to encounter is selecting a language. The languages need to be visible in the subpages. The other subpages should come in the second or third stage.
- Plan your content in all the languages available in advance: When we talk about multilingual websites, we mean websites that exist with the same texts and pages in parallel but in different languages. Think about your navigation menu in advance so everything starts to run currently. Recreating websites in multiple languages is important.
- Translate your content: Translate all the content on your subpages. Think about the text, headings, CTAs, Alt text, and more.
Translating as much content as possible is important, and if certain parts aren’t relevant to the language you selected, you can delete them. Translating your site is better done by using a set of translation tools instead of putting your texts through machine translation tools and directly copying the results onto your website.
Translation tools like Google Translate can be great, but it’s always important to hire a professional translator who knows how to fix the tone and make sure that every word translated makes sense.
Multilingual sites are your best bet for revenue generation
Everything we mentioned in the article shows how important using multilingual practices is for your e-commerce website. After all, reaching an international audience is always much better than being limited to an audience that speaks only one language.
After you are done translating your webpage, get a professional to proofread it and eliminate any terms that are not in line with the audience’s native language.
What’s more fun than to localize your product and services in every country you target? It’s definitely a great feeling to go international!
