Web personalization is all about creating a unique experience for online shoppers, being able to speak to a customer on a personal level based on what their looking for and where their coming from. There are several bloggers out there talking about how it’s important to geo target customers and recognize their location, and how it is important to help them when their lost with relevant messaging based on their depth of visit. All are important aspects of communication with your online shopper, but I believe that in most cases we are overlooking one essential customer trait….do they even speak english?? With a saturated market in North American, retailers are turning towards a more global market to help increase revenues making language barriers a prominent issue for online shoppers.

Even though most people compare online and in store prices, most web retailers overlook basic language barriers. Whether I’m shopping in Mexico City, Monaco, New York City, or Honk Kong each city will have their own personal unique welcome in their native tongue as you enter their store. The moment you reply with a North American ‘Hello’ they recognize that they have a foreign shopper on their hands. In most cases online business retailers are not able to appreciate or recognize this hurdle…..well by most I mean the ones who aren’t two steps ahead of the game because of Sitebrand.

Recently I have had the opportunity to employ this concept with one of my accounts to set up personalized welcome messages based on ‘language’. Within the Sitebrand Segment&Serve platform our customers have the ability to setup campaigns based on the language that has been set by that online shoppers web browser. This one particular account has traffic coming from all over the world and based on their analytical data, we were able to determine that foreign customers were a major portion of their overall traffic. Using Sitebrand’s technology they have been able to welcome each visitor based on their specific language from Dutch, Italian, Spanish and even Japanese with a personalized message in that shoppers native tongue. After running these campaigns for several months we have been able to re-visit the analytical data and enjoy the positive increase in conversion rates for language specific browsers.

E-retailers today try so hard to increase their conversion rates through discounts and promotional offers through emails and pop-ups, when sometimes all it really takes is a simple ‘Hello’.

Alok Ahuja
‘The Road Less Travelled’