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Website internationalization
When you first conjured up a business plan to sell a new product or service, internationalizing your website so that it works optimally across regions may not have been top of mind. Drawing in customers from nearer by might have been more on your horizon than a multiregional website strategy. But as competition, your financial goals, and the global developments around you have heated up and shaped your business scope, a broader market reach may well have become more alluring. Website internationalization will address your growing ambitions.
International website strategy
Diving into new markets digitally means unlocking a wealth of potential new revenue streams, which leads to higher returns on investment pure and simple. If you take the time to take your brand international from website to content, you may increase your revenue by as much as fifty percent in the first year of entering a new market. This is especially true in e-commerce, where payment gateways differ across internet regions and shopping experience is everything.
International e-commerce
Website globalization is on the radar of virtually all growing businesses. An early example of global website optimization is international e-commerce site JD.com, Chinaβs runaway retail success, which revamped its site with an international focus a decade ago, looking to develop the international user experience by making adjustments that cater to a range of Western and Eastern audiences. JD.com may now be the granddaddy of international e-commerce, but upstarts such as Temu.com would arguably not have prioritized internationalizing their own websites if JD.com and its generation had not had so much success from doing so.
Cross cultural web presence
By being designed in such a way that local cultures, languages, and technical landscapes can be incorporated, businesses ensure that their approach to website internationalization resonates with audiences wherever they are. This needs to be done while assuring a cohesive brand identity is recognized across borders. Tailoring content and design to suit local audiences leads to higher satisfaction and engagement. Bringing in culturally relevant visuals, messages, and calls to action is key to getting the clicks across the entire world.
International User Experience
Internet users in China now number 1.1 billion: almost the entire population. And all of these users expect a level of interactivity on their websites that would bedazzle audiences in many other countries. Such features are combined with a need to heavily integrate with mobile platforms such as WeChat, which almost everybody uses for everything from payments to social networking. Mobile-optimized international websites can improve traffic by 20-30% in regions like Asia and Africa, where mobile is the primary form of internet access.
Global website optimization
When designing your site for multiple regions, it’s essential to think from scratch in terms of flexible templates. You will need to know that European languages, with long words, have different spacing needs compared to one designed for East Asian languages, with more compact characters. A flexible template will be able to deal with these linguistic differences, and various date formats with ease.
One of the first steps in website internationalization is preparing your content for easy localization by devising a content management system that enables your site to be rolled out in multiple languages and structuring your website so that text can be easily extracted and translated without breaking the design. Unicode UTF-8 encoding helps ensure that all character sets are supported. Ensuring the website supports multiple languages by designing for different character sets and writing directions.
Understandable CTA
Adding localized features that resonate with your target audience, such as payment gateways or social media login options means preparing your website for localization by thinking global in your website strategy.Studies show that 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language, and 56.2% of consumers say that the ability to get information in their language is more important than price when making a purchasing decisionβ. When it comes to giving your users a call-to-action, you need to know exactly where they expect to find the hyperlink or buy button on your site, and fast.
If your website loads too slowly, you will fail at the first hurdle. Research shows that 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Optimizing load times for different regions is crucial for keeping international users engaged, especially in regions with slower internet speeds, or dealing with different currencies, and other region-specific elements.
Global digital presence from headquarters
Internationalizing your website strategy could arguably be achieved by hiring hundreds of people across the localities where your business operates. Harnessing the power of all these people would be an awesome task in the original meaning of the word. But you would soon be in a tangle. Better to devise a systemic approach to website internationalization, and if necessary, start from square one. By paring down your design to the minimum, and using globally understood language, you can handle your multiregional website strategy from headquarters, on whichever cloud they may be situated.
