The ABCs of website localization to build brand loyalty

Earlier this month, I wrote here about some of the many ways that localizing your website will help you optimize your customer experience, drive customer loyalty, and increase profitability. Stats like this from CSA Research make this case hard to ignore: That 72% of consumers would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language, and 56% feel that obtaining information in their own language is more important than price.

Following up on that piece, the next part of the story will look at some best practices and strategies for rolling out your localization strategy, and factors to consider for providing high-quality translations that truly capture local nuances.

To localize or not to localize? 

As I mentioned in my previous post, market analysts at CSA suggest that localization has a bigger impact on driving sales than writing new content. By their calculations, each dollar invested in localization returns nearly 6x as much revenue compared to new investment in English language content.

With so much potential upside, it would be easy to race out and translate everything on your site into every possible language. But that’s a nearly impossible task, and certainly one that can’t be accomplished quickly. So where to start? Here are a few questions to ask yourself that will help you prioritize which content to start localizing:

• Do you have consistent international traffic to your website? 
• Do you see high levels of quit-and-bounce from within your home base territory? This can signal that you’re not currently addressing non-native speakers. Creating local language pages and measuring their engagement and conversion can play a crucial role in helping you identify new revenue opportunities.
• Do you have competitors operating in other geographic markets? If so, you may want to test how localization can help you to diversify — especially if your own market is forecast to experience difficult economic times.

Based on your answers to these questions, you can identify content that should be localized immediately, and other areas that you can focus on in later phases of your strategy.

It's more than just translation — it's the human touch 

While making content available in a local language is a great step toward personalization, that alone is not enough to turn one-time buyers into long-term brand loyalists. To create that truly personal touch, brands must think about local language nuance, cultural norms, idiomatic phrasings and colloquialisms, as well as tone of voice. After all, no brand can afford to alienate customers and prospects over simple misinterpretations. 

At Weglot, we use DeepL as our primary translation engine, powering our services with the DeepL API. As a result, our customers are seeing big benefits in increased website translation accuracy, speed and scalability. As one of the most accurate machine translation platforms, DeepL excels at providing highly accurate translations that also capture cultural nuance — especially with their new Clarify feature, an interactive translation tool that helps to capture the exact meaning and nuance of what you’re trying to say. 

As a testament to DeepL’s accuracy, the majority of our customers tell us that they don’t feel the need to make edits to DeepL’s translations. Learn more about how DeepL and Weglot work together here.

How to get started with your localization strategy

When moving into a new market by expanding your localization strategy, it’s wise to prioritize target markets rather than adding many languages all at once. This will help you grow specific opportunities while keeping your branding consistent. 

Here are a few best practices that will help you get started:

• Like many decisions in business, use the 80/20 rule and start by delivering one language as a machine-based version, and then iterating. 
• Once refined, expand your approach to more languages (if that’s within the scope of your localization strategy). 
• Focus your localization efforts on key pages that are converting well. This is where you’ll have the most impact on refining your translations further.
• Compare those well-converting pages to any that aren’t, and you will likely see that capturing cultural nuance is playing a role in your success. 
• Be judicious with your time and budget spent. Be sure to capture necessary metrics — such as reach, traffic keywords, positioning, search terms, and advertisement performance.

Weglot customer REVIEWS.io saw a 120% increase in traffic in a single month. Then for 24 pages, they rolled out German language versions and saw a 44% increase in conversion!

Bigblue saw similar results; they now spend one-third less time on their translation process, and are seeing a 2x increase in blog traffic as a result!

The benefits of a phased approach

Localizing your content further — beyond your high-priority pages — doesn’t have to be an immediate action. In fact, many companies launch a machine-translated website and implement the best practices listed above when they have more time to perfect their messaging. 

The benefit of using machine translation, together with human post-edit, is that it allows for local language translation at scale, without losing local flare and elegance. This blend of AI and human expertise is ideal when there is deeply technical or highly regulated content to deliver. The legal, pharmaceutical, financial and health sectors are all great examples of this. 

Companies using Weglot to translate their websites benefit not only from DeepL’s accurate translation capabilities, but can also refine translations when the time is right through Weglot’s dedicated translation management dashboard.

When presenting the business case for localization, don’t pitch localization based on cost, but rather on values like brand recognition and revenue yield. For those just getting started with localization, a machine/human hybrid model will be far less expensive than existing solutions, and allow for a solid market entry.

An excellent means to grow and enhance personalization 

Localization is an excellent strategy to drive expansion into new markets — and it’s extremely cost-effective! Coupled with the ability to test fast, localization can be instrumental in delivering the personalized feel that creates engagement and contributes to long-term brand advocacy.  

Joining DeepL’s partner program helps us grow even further, and we’re looking forward to continuing our collaboration to break down language barriers and enable businesses to connect with their global audience. You can read more about our relationship with DeepL here.

To learn more about what your business can achieve with the DeepL API, check out their upcoming webinar: