Global eCommerce is the new reality. Your user base, visitors, and customers come from various parts of the world.
Learning how to adapt your eCommerce marketing strategy to dynamically show pertinent content to a cluster of visitors -- depending on the country they are visiting from (among several other ways to differentiate what users see), for instance.
Your eCommerce store had two visitors today: a 50-yr old single mom who lives in Florida and a 28-yr old single man from Singapore.
Both of them visit your store, consume content, check out your products, browse through your offerings, and even sign up for your newsletter. Each of these visitors speak different languages. They vary significantly -- age, culture, purchase power parity, and shopping preferences.
The question is this: Would you serve the same content, target them with the same marketing messages, give them similar offers, and show prices in USD?
Ideally, you shouldn’t.
eCommerce brands (along with regular websites and content-rich online publications) use “GeoTargeting” to change content and make it relevant to visitors.
- What is GeoTargeting? How Does It Work?
- How to Quickly Adapt Marketing Strategy By Country
- Domain Extensions
- Language [+ Words and Expressions]
- Shipping Rules & Currency
- Audience Segmentation By Country
What is GeoTargeting? How Does It Work?
Geotargeting originally started as a way for advertisers to use precise targeting for their ads, also used in combination with Radius targeting (by fixing a perimeter for local ads, for instance).
Today, however, technology has made it possible to use geotargeting for websites (extended to eCommerce stores, and large digital publications) to deliver content specific to user locales.
Geotargeting can also be used for targeted lead generation, messaging based on user location, targeted content delivery for local users (continuously adapting for different users from most locations).
eCommerce lead generation popups offering a discount can address users by saying something like “We Got Offers for You, Angelenos. Get 30% Off Now!”.
Or, landing pages can have country-specific offers, content, prices, and shipping options.
Along with geotargeting (an expansive list of things to deploy), you can also adapt your eCommerce marketing strategy by country as follows:
How to Quickly Adapt Marketing Strategy By Country
Domain Extensions
If you are an eCommerce brand with sizable audiences in countries you serve in, consider going all out with domain extensions, pertinent to the countries you serve. Internet users tend to associate country-specific domain name extensions as one of the first things they’d associate with.
Amazon, for instance, is big enough to consider not only domain name extensions but completely different lines of businesses for each country-level domain extension.
For instance, there’s the good old American version: Amazon.com
Then, there are others (each fundamentally different or slightly similar to the American business)
Amazon.in -- for India. While following local Indian laws, and uses the Indian currency. Amazon.in features Indian brands (along with others) on the platform.
Notice the use of payment methods unique to India such as UPI (United Payments Interface), Netbanking, Mobile Wallets, and Credit Cards (with tokenization) and so on.
Amazon.sg -- Amazon for Singapore. Product prices are shown in Singapore dollars and payment methods relevant to Singapore are used such as PayNow, China Union Pay or UnionPay, and others. This is on top of credit/debit cards and gift cards.
You don’t have to run completely different businesses (unique to each country). However, hosting different products (available, on Inventory), relevant content, and trying to make the domain extension for each country as unique as possible certainly matters.
Language [+ Words and Expressions]
One of the other ways you can optimize eCommerce stores for visitors from other countries in the world is with language localization. Delivering content in the languages your visitors or potential customers prefer is a fantastic way to ensure maximum localization.
Speak the language, and you are welcomed home. Get straight to the heart and minds of your potential visitors.
Technically, adapting language could mean completely reworking content in other languages.
Or it might mean that you work with multi-language plugins for WooCommerce.
In Shopify’s case, you’d need to use certain apps such as “Translate and Adapt” by Shopify or by using Transcy: AI language translate by OneCommerce.io
Shipping Rules & Currency
It’s imperative that your potential customers see shipping rules that apply to them and see prices in the currency that they are used to.
The experience is jarring when everything is priced in US dollars. No matter how easy it is to check for equivalent prices in their own currency, it’s just additional work. No one wants to do more work to shop.
If it’s online, on an eCommerce store, all this friction leads to the already existing problem of Shopping cart abandonment.
Using simple plugins and apps (or even native features of your eCommerce platform), you can ensure that you establish clear shipping rules (or clearly mention that you do free shipping).
Provide complete shipping details (shipping costs, expected time frame, carrier used, and leave a support channel open).
As for currency displayed for products, there are apps and plugins that help.
For WooCommerce, you have WooCommerce Multi-currency, WOOCS (WooCommerce Currency Switcher), and many others.
Shopify merchants can use apps like Currency Converter Bear, MLV Auto Currency Switcher, Multi-Currency Converter Hero, and others.
Audience Segmentation By Country
Everything mentioned above is while visitors are “on your eCommerce store, browsing and consuming content”.
What happens if they sign up for a discount and become a subscriber? How do you nurture them after they make a purchase? Or when they abandon their shopping cart?
This is when you’d use the power of email marketing by tapping into features such as tags and segmentation.
Most email service providers like Drip, Klaviyo, MailChimp, and others provide you with ways to tag your subscribers or customers.
These platforms also include ways for visitors or customers to choose “countries and currencies” as preferences (while signing up or making a purchase).
For instance, you could automate tagging customers by country and currency based on their transactions (IP detection, credit card issuing country, billing location, customer preferences, and more).
If you’d like to see how some of the world’s most inspiring eCommerce brands do marketing, check out Panoramata. Use Panoramata for creating inspiration lists, browse examples of email campaigns and ads, and learn from the best.
