Did you know that 76% of online customers prefer to buy products that use their native language?
Even more revealing is the fact that 40% of customers refuse to buy from a website that uses a different language to their own, according to CSA Research.
Let’s let that sink in for a moment.
If you’re neglecting to localize your digital products and provide information or content in other languages – you’re missing out on a heap of sales.
This is especially true for businesses that sell digital products. When people buy things online, there needs to be a high level of trust and understanding. Localization of content and information helps to build this as well as extending the customer lifecycle, as we’ll see in a moment.
This guide will look at ways to maximize your market share and expand your international reach by improving customer experience (CX) through digital localization.
🚀 The benefits of localizing your digital product to improve CX 🔗
Before we go into the specifics of how to localize your digital product, let’s first take a look at some of the main CX benefits you can expect to achieve.
Improved communication 🔗
When you get down to brass tacks, good customer experience is all about communication. If your content is in a different language, you risk alienating many people and setting up a communication barrier that is difficult to overcome. Language barriers can potentially reduce the positive feelings people have towards your brand. To reach a global market, you must focus on high-quality localization that tears down language and cultural barriers.
Multilingual customer support is a good customer experience win, as customers appreciate being able to access information and help in their language. Research shows that forcing customers to jump between languages during the customer lifecycle puts people off.
In other words, it’s not enough that your marketing materials and app content are localized if your support documents and live chat assistance is not.
Remember to appraoch localization in a holistic manner and try to localize as much content as possible when you decide to introduce a new language.
More trust 🔗
How do you build trust? The main way is through honest communication. You also need to listen to and understand your customer. You'll build credibility and trust if you can understand your customer’s needs and respond to them positively. Trust is vital for business success.
Building trust can be a significant challenge when selling digital products that can’t be physically touched or seen. Speaking to people in their language is a quick win in the trust stakes. It shows that you’ve taken the time to consider your customer’s needs and put in the extra work to meet them.
Remember to thoroughly test all localized pages and features to spot mistakes or missing translations!
Cultural relevance 🔗
A mistake that many online retailers make is to assume that all cultures view things in a similar way. The truth is every nation, continent, and culture perceives things in different ways. Some differences are small; some are large. For instance, a perfectly polite phrase in the USA may sound pushy or offensive in some parts of the world.
The last thing you want to do is market and present your products in a way that doesn’t align with different cultural values and expectations.
High-quality localization services, such as Localazy, can help you to present your content in a culturally sensitive way. Localazy uses professional translators and advanced MT engines to ensure that translated text makes sense and is culturally appropriate. This helps to meet customer expectations in whichever country you are targeting.
Receive feedback 🔗
If all your content is in English only, you’ll miss out on valuable feedback from customers who don’t feel confident enough to provide it. On the other hand, if you open up the communication channels by providing your digital content in the customer’s native language, they’ll be much more likely to provide you with useful feedback.
The feedback you receive can be analyzed carefully, and you’ll be able to gain valuable insights into any weaknesses you may have and how well your international expansion efforts are going.
Encourage users to give you feedback in their own language. For example, see how Airbnb does it with their reviews.
Increase loyalty 🔗
Each of the benefits listed above feeds into a great overall customer experience and CX is the most important thing to get right if you want to increase customer retention.
Most internet users expect a seamless and convenient experience these days. If they come up against friction in the form of a language barrier, then they’ll be far less likely to buy from you again.
When you consider that only around 26% of all internet users speak English as their first language, you are potentially missing out on a lot of customers and you may fail to build loyalty with your existing ones.
🚩 How to start with localization? 🔗
Our digital, internet-driven world is one without geographical barriers.
But that doesn’t mean that language and cultural barriers don’t exist. Localizing content and information is very important when selling digital products online.
When buying products online, customers need reassurance that your brand is trustworthy and that your products will make sense to them.
Why Localazy? 🔗
So. what is the easiest way to start localizing your digital products you might ask? We beleive that Localazy can help introduce you into the localization world. What is Localazy? It's is a continuous translation management platform that strives to make the localization and translation process efficient and enjoyable for any project. It supports a wide variety of frameworks and an even more comprehensive range of formats through its command line interface (CLI) and API.
Localazy offers three general approaches to choose from and blend to translate your digital projects:
- 💪🏻 Translate on your own or invite contributors - You can start translating on your own and use our built-in suggestion system.
- 🦾 Translate everything in bulk via machine translation - With the Localazy Autopilot plan, you can instantly translate all strings by running a machine translation over the content.
- 🚩 Fully automate the translation process with the Continuous Localization services - Once your Localazy integration is set up, you can order translations from our vetted translators and get your project translated by professionals automatically. The service is also proactive, so you don't have to micromanage translators, and you can visit Localazy only once in a while to check the progress.
Where to learn more? 🔗
We recommend these resources to get you started:
- How to prepare your project for localization?
- How to start with localization?
- How to make translators happy to cooperate?
- How to prepare a style guide for localization?
- Why is Localazy better than spreadsheets for localization?
The above articles should provide you with enough knowledge to start without any trouble.
✔️ Conclusion 🔗
You can also sign up for a free Localazy account to try our digital localization platform hands-on. Localization of your digital product will help to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Sign up and find out how Localazy can help you to localize your content in a friction-free way.
