How Tailoring Content Based on Language Settings Can Increase Conversions

If you’ve never considered tailoring the content for your website based on language settings, then you may be alienating part of your audience. While your site might be in English, people ordering goods through the Internet of Things is truly a global market and your conversions may just increase if you take language into consideration.

For one, 75% of online users prefer to read and shop in their native language.

The United States is truly a melting pot of languages and cultures. Neglecting just one market, such as the bilingual Hispanic market, could be costing you conversions. According to the 2010 Census, Hispanics make up 17% of our total population. Not only is this market going to be growing, but they also shop differently than native-English speakers. 66% of Hispanics in the United States pay attention to online ads. This may not seem significant until you learn that this is 20 percentage points above the general online population.

Furthermore, when it comes to informing themselves before making a purchase, the Hispanic community favors online sources above family, friends, and television ads. These data points alone indicate that if you’re not tapping into this market by offering a buying experience that matches their likes, you could be losing customers and conversions.

Is Translation Enough?

It may not be enough to just plug in a translating option for your content. Text encoding problems can present themselves when you’re trying to engage multiple audiences in multiple languages. You may have to go further and change the back-end encoding of your content to accommodate for multiple languages as well as your UI.

Customizing content based on an individual’s language settings is time-consuming. You don’t want to go a DIY route – no language customization is better than shoddy customization. You need to ensure that your content and keywords are culturally relevant and appropriate to your consumers. Work with native speakers of the language you want your content to be viewed in. They can often provide invaluable cultural insight that could stop you from making a major faux pas.

What About My On-Site Advertisements? (e.g. Exit Intent Popup)

Some systems allow you to have different popups on different pages of your site that would theoretically allow you to tailor your content to target different languages. For example, you could launch a Spanish popup only on Spanish pages of your site. The downside is you can only target these specific pages. If a Spanish-speaker ends up navigating to an English page, you won’t be able to launch the Spanish incentives without alienating English-speakers that also end up on those English pages. Only having English campaigns or only having Spanish campaigns on your entire site, as we have discussed, also risks alienating visitors.

Our Dynamic Visitor Promotion (DVP) is different. With language detection, we can actually detect the visitor’s preferred language settings, and provide content and incentives in that language, regardless of what page they’re on or navigate to.

Not everyone speaks English or responds to standard American advertising methods. If you want to reach a global audience, you’ll need to ensure that you’re speaking their language, literally.