How to Increase Sales for Your Online Business Globally

We live in a time where you can sell your products and services anywhere around the globe. Our increasingly digital world makes it possible for someone in Australia to buy a product from a company in the US and have it delivered to their doorstep within a couple of days. Doing this was impossible a few years back when the only way a business could sell globally was through opening brick and mortar stores around the world.

While the internet has made it so much easier for you to sell internationally simply opening an e-commerce site won’t guarantee your business sales. There are important steps you must take to attract and retain customers.

What are the things you have to do to make your online business profitable?

1. Know the market

A lot of business owners make the mistake of thinking that what has made them successful in their local market will automatically work in foreign markets. Most of the time that is not the case.

Each market has its own cultural, economic and political environments. Understanding the environment you’re getting into is therefore crucial. For example, when researching about a foreign market you’ll know what bureaucracy to expect or the barriers you might face before getting to a market. With the information collected it will be easier for you to strategize on how to enter a market and be successful at it.

2. Create a buyer persona

According to HubSpot, a buyer persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

As a business going into new markets you have to clearly define the person who is likely to immediately buy your product once they’re made aware of it. When creating a buyer persona you should ask some of the following questions:

• How old are they?
• Is it a man or a woman?
• How much do they earn?
• What is their level of education?
• Are they married or do they have children?

The more information you have about your potential client the better. It will, for example, help you determine where to spend your time and money to reach them and get a Return On Investment.

3. Speak to the customer in their language and break down any cultural barriers

Thanks to translation tools like Google Translate your e-commerce platform can easily be translated into multiple languages. If you’re to make a ton of sales in the markets you enter, having your content readily available in the local language is a must.

However, if you want to avoid having embarrassing content errors on your website get human translation services. Automated translation is fast and cheap but it cannot be as good as a human translator. With professional language translation services, your website’s content will be well-written and proofread to ensure it conveys a clear message of what you’re selling to customers.

Translating your website content is a good first step but you can go further and localize graphics on your website. The graphics on your website are as important as the text and you don’t want to have graphics that will offend potential buyers. You can, for example, offend African American customers if your models are made to look light skinned.

4. Do Video Marketing

Customers buying products online love seeing what they are buying. Your website may have high-quality images or well-written product reviews but engaging videos are likely to get you more sales.

When you show customers what your product can do they can immediately fall in love with it and make a purchase. Like written content, your videos should also be in different languages. Again, I advise you to work with an internet translation agency to get the best translation done for your videos.

There are a lot more ways you can try to increase your global online sales like making your website mobile friendly, regular blogging, SEO, etc. Let’s keep this conversation going. Leave a comment below and let me know what you have done to increase your company’s global sales. I would love to hear from you.

Translation for your e-commerce business? We will take care of it!