Grow your Ecommerce business by adopting and implementing a strategy to cater to international markets.

According to Digital Commerce 360, “almost half of global web consumers will purchase across borders by 2020.” And much of that growth, DC360 says, is going to come from China.

What this means, is that many consumers will look to purchase products from online retailers that are not located in their home country.

Is your business prepared to capture this growth?

Why localization is important

Retailers that sell luxury goods, popular brands, or unique or hard to find items, should be even more keen to the importance of these projections, as they are more likely to receive cross border purchases, than say a retailer selling common household items in their country.

Why is localization important? Take Chinese consumers, for example, and their buying preferences.

According to Forrester, 95% of Chinese consumers prefer to purchase goods that are sold to them in their own language.

So if you want to position your Ecommerce business to capture this projected growth, and if you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to think about creating and executing a localization and internationalization strategy.

Your localization and internationalization strategy

What does a localization/internationalization strategy look like?

But before we dive into that, there tends to be a little confusion on what the terms, Localization and Internationalization mean, so let’s define them first.

You can think of Internationalization as being your overall global strategy for preparing your business to be able to enter different markets.

For example, is your Ecommerce platform equipped to handle purchases or orders in other countries or markets that you might be interested in entering? Is your site able to price products in local currencies for the markets you’re in? Do you have the customer support framework in place to handle customers from other countries and time zones?

Localization, on the other hand, deals with the actual process of implementing the necessary steps for a market.

For example, you decide to begin selling into China, one of your localization tasks would be to translate the product descriptions on your website from English to Chinese. Translating the marketing content that you are going to use to grow your business there. That’s localization.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the components of your overall localization and internationalization strategy.

Software

Having the right software in place will make your localization and internationalization strategy much easier.

Let’s look at two different types of software that are going to help tremendously: Having a Translation Management System (or TMS) and Global Email Marketing platform.

TMS

Having the right Translation Management System, like Translation Exchange, makes it so much easier to localize into new markets.

By simply adding one SDK or line of code to your Ecommerce site, you will now be in a position to localize your website into any new market.

The TMS also has prebuilt connectors so you can begin localizing your marketing content as well as your website –which really allows you to cater to and expand your growing international customer base.

Email Marketing

dotmailer is a global marketing automation platform with email at its core.

With a prebuilt dotmailer connector for Translation Exchange clients, once you have written your email templates in the platform, simply select which ones you want to translate and push them to Translation Exchange.

When the templates are in Translation Exchange, you can then easily select which languages you want to translate them to, then order the translations on demand from our marketplace of translators. Prior to the order being placed, you will be able to see the exact cost of the translation, and then you can track the progress of the translation using TE’s dashboard.

The average translator at a Language Service Provider can translate roughly 2000 words per day so that should give you a good idea of how long it will take to get your emails translated. In most cases you can be sending your localized emails within 24 hours or less!

After the emails are translated and everything checks out, you can then push the emails back into dotmailer with the simple click of a button.

With the translated emails are back in dotmailer, you are now ready to launch your global email marketing campaign!

For more information on how to translate your email marketing campaigns using dotmailer and Translation Exchange, please check out our integrations page here or send us an email at either sales@dotmailer.com or sales@translationexchange.com.