6 Ways To Prepare Your Multilingual eCommerce Platform For Black Friday
On last year’s Black Friday, online shoppers spent over 7 billion USD, placing the eCommerce Industry above the real-life shopping experience. 1 While Black Friday started out in the U.S., it has become something of a global event. So, with the race towards the big day having started, you may be wondering how you can best take your Black Friday strategies global in a way that doesnt involve an entire website rehaul.
Here are our top 6 tips on how you can take your Black Friday eCommerce strategies global while still maintaining the customer satisfaction you have built-in your home base.
1. Can Your Site Handle The Black Friday Pressure?
According to a study by Imperva 2, mobile compatibility and the page’s loading time are top priorities for online buyers. In fact, 62% of online shoppers have stated that they will not wait more than 5 seconds for a page to load.
On par with loading time, websites should also be able to carry the huge increase in demand that Black Friday, not to mention Cyber Monday, will bring with it. Two years ago, Walmart, J.Crew and Lowe’s, got a serious hit when their sites, unprepared for the increase in traffic, experienced serial outages on Black Friday. 3 In the case of Walmart, close to 4 million shoppers, experienced technical difficulties, costing the retail giant around 9 billion USD.
So, before you start to focus on your readiness to meet the linguistic and marketing demands of your international user-base, make sure that they make it through that first threshold! Consult your IT Team on a sustainable plan to make sure the increase in demand can be met effectively.
2. What About Your Inventory?
Okay, one more step to go before we can start translating. Because ideally, your new multilingual strategy will boost website engagement. This means you should be prepared on all fronts, including your inventory.
Black Friday is known for its crazy discounts of up to 70%, and of course, it is up to you to decide which products can go at that rate. However, in order to keep customers happy and maintain a consistent flow of sales and communication, it is essential to do a stock-take prior to allowing marketing and offers to go out. During the event itself, keep up the communication with the warehouse so your customer service can stick to helping to purchase along rather than being harassed by angry clients.
And they can get very angry indeed In fact, you may still remember Best Buy’s Black Friday inventory problems which means many of their products could not be delivered. It had earned them the unflattering headlines of Best Buy Is Ruining Christmas. 4 We’re sure none of you would like that reputation!
3. Define Your International SEO Strategies
Now that your site and inventory are in order, it is time to think multilingual. And first things first. How to get started in terms of SEO? Well, don’t worry. You won’t have to rewrite your entire website in order to. This is what we recommend you do:
- Identify the languages available on your site and the ones you will be targeting for this Black Friday. We recommend that you select the markets where your product has the most promise or, where they have already had some success. Check Google Analytics to see where most of your visitors are coming from and make a short-list!
- Design a landing page specifically for the deals you intend to offer, focus on your promotional content and offers
- Target the pages with terms for Black Friday and Cyber Monday geared towards your own brand and niche. Keep an eye on compelling titles and meta descriptions!
- Reach out to a Language Service Provider to translate and localize the landing page. They will follow a strict Translation, Editing and Proofreading (TEP) Process that will guarantee a genuine connection with your audience.
- Provide your Language Service Provider (LSP) with a term-base listing all the keywords you wish to be localized for your page. Native linguists and SEO specialists familiar with local cultures and Local SEO tools such as Google Trends , can give you the best translation for each keyword that will reach your target locale by applying your personalized content strategy.
Pro Tip! Not sure how to get started on the term-base or would you like some more information on International SEO in general? Check our blog on How To Apply International SEO To Your Multilingual Web Content! We also inform you on which types of keywords you should provide!
From here, you should track your progress and test your keywords effectively so you can tweak where it is needed. This means that you should keep an eye on your site’s performance and loading times on Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you want to get faster results, match your organic efforts with paid searches like Google Ads!
4. Know Your Audience: Is It Black Friday Or White Friday?
Here is something you might not have thought of, but Black Friday doesn’t have the same association everywhere and you should pay attention to which culture you are trying to introduce your product to! Let’s look at the Middle Eastern market as an example.
The Middle East is getting higher on many company’s radars right in terms of translation and localization. Arabic is the fastest growing online language 5, and companies worldwide would like to benefit from this stellar growth in online presence. However, when considering your Black Friday offers in the Middle East, you should keep more than the suitability of your product in mind.
First of all, in the Middle East Black Friday is not black at all. While for the US market Black Friday is associated with thanksgiving, this holiday is not observed in the Middle East. What’s more, black has a rather dark connotation for what Muslims consider to be a sacred day. So instead, the Middle East knows Black Friday as White Friday.
If you would like to benefit from White Friday, local culture, religion, and sensitivities must be respected as well as the language. And while this may sound like common sense, you’d be surprised how much our western goggles can subconsciously blind us. So, make sure to always consult native, in-country linguists who know the language, but also know how to respect the culture! This goes for any country or region you would wish to include in your expansion strategies.
5. Get Culture and Language-Specific Black Friday Offers Out There Now
Marketing content in any language is uniquely designed to speak to your audience in an emotional and personal way. So, a mere translation will not be enough to resonate with international customers. This is where Transcreation comes in. Transcreation combines translation and creation and adds targeted marketing insights to translated content.
Let’s have a look at Email Marketing by way of example. Email marketing may be old-school, but it is still a trusted eCommerce Marketing tool. And this type of content deserves a lot of TLC in any language. Developing content geared towards interests, buyer stages but also locales, adds an extra punch of cultural potency that can strengthen the trust between you and your potential customer.
Looking for a quality vendor to successfully translate your eCommerce Content?
We offer you a step by step overview of which tools, resources, and experience your services provider should have and why!
Pro Tip! Read our blog on Transcreation and how it is best managed! We have included a Creative Brief with everything you should share with your LSP to get top quality work in the shortest possible turnaround time so you can get your marketing out ASAP.
In order to achieve the desired result and stand out from the hundreds of offers sent out every day, tweak your original copy before sending it in by:
Introducing a clickable subject line. Make sure it offers a valid preview of what your offer will be about.
- Make the design sleek and simple. Do not let it distract. Note that Languages Services Providers can contract DTP (Desktop Publishing) Experts so that the format, colors, fonts, and any visual elements will also fit your target locale.
- Inject actionable CTAs that take customers straight to the offer.
Multilingual eCommerce Platforms have their own unique translation challenges. You may be wondering which service you should use for the marketing content? And what about the User-Generated Content? Or the Product Descriptions? Have a look at our 3-part video about the 3 main eCommerce Translation Challenges and how to overcome them! Just press play and every video will play automatically!
6. Be Ready With Around-The-Clock Multilingual Customer Service
If you are expanding your Black Friday eCommerce strategies to new markets, you should also be prepared to answer pressing questions from impatient international buyers. Assuming you don’t have the resources to hire a native-speaking agent for each of the locales you have targeted, let’s focus a little on which translation services you should best focus on Machine Translation (MT).
Machine Translation for eCommerce Platforms is best applied when you have an integration between your Content Management System (CMS), Translation (CAT)Tool, and MT-Engine, so you can connect your eCommerce Platform directly with your Language Service Provider and translations can be delivered on a continuous scale.
As the communications and content grow more sophisticated and the output itself is not enough, Post-Editors can be set the task to review the output and tweak them in any way necessary. This process is referred to as Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE).
Pro Tip! Curious to learn more? Check out our blog on how to apply Machine Translation and Machine Translation Post Editing to your eCommerce Translation strategy.
It is essential to remember that not every content type can benefit from Machine Translation. Your landing pages and marketing, as discussed before, should be handled by human linguists exclusively. Have a look at this graph as a handy cheat-sheet on which content types benefit from which translation strategies.
Conclusion:
A multilingual, Black Friday eCommerce strategy combines some essential prep-work with international SEO and content strategies. Any strategy should start with a confirmation that your website and inventory are up to the task, after which you can dig deeper into the translation of your eCommerce content. With this, you should leverage the expertise of Language Service Providers who use linguistic tools and trained professionals to make your website culturally and linguistically savvy.
At Laoret, we work with in-country natives who are specialized in the eCommerce Industry and bring them together in a streamlined workflow that follows the best practices and ensures Quality Assurance on every level. Our 24/7 availability ensures that we can work according to your schedule and get you ready in time to compete on a global level.
