Personalisation is a key marketing strategy for eCommerce companies. As you collect more data from leads and customers, you can deliver more relevant messages to individuals. These messages resonate with people on a more personal basis and address their specific needs.
What happens when eCommerce companies have to translate all of these personalised messages, though? For retailers targeting multiple language audiences, personalisation can be a daunting prospect.
So let’s explore how eCommerce companies can make personalisation and translation work together effectively.
Why is translation & personalisation a difficult mix?
Scale is the reason many eCommerce companies struggle to find the right mix with translation and personalisation. The eCommerce customer journey involves a lot of interactions between brands and consumers.
Personalisation multiples the volume of potential messages you have to deliver. Instead of generic interactions with everyone, you create multiple variations for different audience types – even down to the individual.
If you, then, have to translate all of these messages into multiple languages, the workload can spiral out of control.
Delivery is the next challenge. How do you make sure the right message reaches the right individual at any given moment, in the right language?
Thankfully, we have all of the tools required to make this work, but you need to implement them correctly into a workable translation strategy that makes sense for your campaigns.
What tools do you need for personalisation?
Before translating anything, you need the right personalisation system in place – one that is optimised for a translation strategy.
Here’s what you’re going to need to get started:
- Customer data: Insights on all of your leads and customers including e-mail addresses, interests, purchase histories, demographics, psychographics, etc.
- A data management system: The platform that stores your customer data in profiles and allows you to use it to deliver messages and drive your marketing campaigns.
- Marketing automation: Technology that uses workflows to respond to customer actions and database updates so you can deliver personalised messages automatically, at scale.
- Personalisation channels: Email is the most common (and effective) channel but you can incorporate other channels like landing pages, chatbots, push notifications and a variety of other devices with the right setup.
- Product recommendations: This is one of the most important personalisation strategies in eCommerce and it can be done via re-marketing strategies.
- Attribution: An analytics system capable of attributing key actions and events (e.g. purchases) to personalised interactions – so you know what is and what isn’t working.
With these tools in place, you will have a solid foundation for personalising content using important customer data.
Now the next step is to start thinking about translating your personalised messages.
How to translate eCommerce personalisation
The good news is, if you are doing personalisation properly, translation can fit seamlessly into your workflow. Marketing personalisation doesn’t happen by magic. You don’t wait for a customer to do something and, then, create a personalised message.
Instead, mapping out the customer journey and researching your ideal customers is what helps make things happen. Then, you create personalised messages for all of the key moments – before they happen – and deliver them using automation.
So, when a customer buys a product, they automatically receive a personalised confirmation e-mail with their name, details and any other personalised elements you want to include, such as product recommendations, vouchers for their next purchase, etc.
The better you know your ideal customers, the more of this messaging you can create ahead of time. For example, a good approach is to create e-mail templates for your most popular products and schedule product recommendation e-mails at the times your customers are most likely to make their next purchase. Translating these messages also should be part of the basis of your personalisation strategy and, again, this requires inserting personalised details like names and products using variables.
You can also localise elements to address the unique interests of audiences in specific language markets. For example, when sending out winter campaigns for the UK you should keep in mind that your customers in Australia are enjoying summer while potential buyers in Indonesia enjoy tropical temperatures year-round.
With the correct planning and market research, you can create and translate 90% of your personalised messages and use automation to add the final details.
Struggling to implement personalisation & eCommerce translation?
If you need help making personalisation and eCommerce translation work, our eCommerce translation team can help. Please get in touch with us by filling out the form on our contact page and we’ll get back to you.