Today’s multicultural, always-connected and digitally savvy society demands a comprehensive translation and localisation strategy to drive customer engagement across the globe. A prime driver for this is how ecommerce is passing a monumental milestone in its short history. This year, it is forecast that Asia Pacific will pass North America and become the largest ecommerce regional market in the world worth $525.2 billion compared to $482.6 billion (Source: eMarketer).
This seismic change further erodes the presumption that the prime language of ecommerce is English. Indeed new studies reveal a more complex pattern when it comes to the language people prefer when browsing and buying online.
In its “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” report, the Common Sense Advisory (CSA) Board revealed that 75 percent of online shoppers are more likely to buy products from websites in their native language and 74 percent are more likely to purchase from the same brand again if the after-sales care is in their language.
Among younger consumers this trend gains in strength. The latest of my company’s studies into Millennial marketing preferences found that even in English speaking markets 32 percent of millennial consumers prefer a language other than English, and 46 percent are more likely to purchase if information is presented in their preferred language.
So it is imperative for brands to speak to consumers in the language they desire to improve the overall customer experience, foster brand advocacy and ultimately drive increased sales. Quite simply if a market doesn’t speak English, it’s no longer an excuse for marketing content to be only in English or hardly translated at all.
Achieving this goal in fast moving multi-national, multilingual markets is exceptionally challenging. It requires digital marketers to find manageable ways to translate high quality content into multiple languages at high volumes and high speed.
While the challenges are great, so are the rewards of strong localisation processes. This is encouraging a growing number of digital marketers to embrace integrated content and language solutions. For example Accor, the world’s leading hotel operator, recently addressed the need to prioritise and centralise the translation process within their organisation with a language solution combining machine translation, project management and translation services. This is now enabling the chain to translate over 20 million words a year to ensure that its customers receive the quality experience they expect – in their native languages.
The need to keep pace with globalisation should lead digital marketers to take advantage of cloud-based approaches to simplify and speed up the localisation processes. In theory marketing cloud solutions make translation technology and services easily accessible to businesses of all sizes and in all locations. However, the value of these offerings will depend on how well they integrate with existing processes and applications as well as offer access to both translation services and machine translation capabilities.
All too often, language can be an afterthought in an organisation’s customer experience strategy. Marketers now need to address the demands of globalisation and ensure that their business speaks only one language – the language of the customers.
By Paige O'Neill, CMO of SDL.
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