You’re familiar with how to sell to U.S. consumers online. But is that experience going to help you expand revenue in Europe or Asia?
Wherever you find digital shopping, you will also find different regional requirements for succeeding in those markets. To accommodate those local customs across the global market, your customer experience needs to be flexible. Flexibility in this area does not mean your customer experience needs to touch its nose to its toes. A flexible global customer experience means that your business technology gives the best customer experience to anyone who visits your site, no matter where they come from.
Localization is one technique you should use for creating the good customer experiences. It is important for maximizing recurring revenue, because it provides more acquisitions up front and more renewals later on, thus reducing your churn rates and increasing your customer lifetime value.
To help you take your business to this next level of safe and secure customer experiences optimized for global customers, we put together this analysis of the seven most important aspects for creating the best customer experience to grow your global subscriber base:
- Languages
- Currencies
- Prices
- Payment methods
- Page elements
- Taxes
- Risk management
Localize Languages
Avoid making assumptions about which language to display to your customers based solely on their geolocation. Instead, rely on the preferences customers select in the browser. Then use those preferences to deliver the right customer experience for sign-up pages, marketing emails, customer account sections and in-app messages.
Localize Currencies
If you want to raise conversion rates and maximize renewal rates, you must let subscribers pay in their local currency. Depending on your base currency, a fluctuating exchange rate may be a problem for CLV, or it may be an opportunity for unexpected cash. Research your competition and test different pricing methods to see which prices work best for specific regional markets.
Localize Prices
You can price your service in a local currency but still not offer a competitive price. When you set prices in local currencies, don’t use a floating exchange rate to convert the prices of your product, and make sure the prices display in clean, round numbers. You also have to consider the purchasing power of the average customer in your target market.
Localize Payment Methods
Localizing payment methods makes the user experience of paying for subscriptions as simple as possible for the customer. Many subscribers in different regions of the world prefer to use payment methods other than credit card. You must offer those payment methods to reduce friction in the customer experience and increase recurring revenue rates.
Localize Page Elements
Page elements are easy to overlook, but they are essential to providing exceptional customer experiences to your global subscribers. The way you display dates, prices, and form fields must all comply with local conventions, which vary widely.
Localize Taxes
If you are the merchant of record for your online transactions, you need a system in place to correctly calculate, collect and remit taxes to the proper tax authorities. Displaying taxes the right way raises conversion rates and maximizes renewals. And complying with regional tax law mitigates the risk to your business. But the number of taxing jurisdictions across the world makes achieving compliance with all global tax requirements on your own a difficult challenge.
Localize Risk Management
More and more, companies are starting to realize just how important it is to both comply with regional privacy standards and secure crucial business data from hackers and breaches. The more you know about your obligations in the areas of data privacy and information security, the safer your customers will feel and the safer your business will be.
Keystone
Localization is crucial for creating better customer experiences and earning more recurring revenue. When you implement great customer experiences, you make it easier for people around the world to subscribe to your service, and that means more recurring revenue for you.
