18 March 2022
Putting the “local” into localization
One of Alpha’s clients is a British High Street retailer, known mostly for women’s, children’s and men’s clothes, but also for interior décor and accessories. A home-grown success story, their products are high quality and affordable, and they boast stores in a number of other countries around the world.
When the world of e-commerce beckoned, this particular company decided to proceed with caution. Having designed a great website and listed all of their goods on it, they made this website available in the local languages of each country where a physical store had opened.
The problem was that the company was providing all of its customers, worldwide, with the same weekly homepage and email design. None of the content was localized to reflect what was important culturally and regionally in the different countries where the company had both e-commerce sites and ‘bricks and mortar’ stores.
The company soon realized that this was not ideal. It wasn’t that the company didn’t care about the differences in the countries; they just had neither the in-house resources nor the expertise. They decided to contact Alpha CRC to make use of the fine-tuned global resources in all things localization.
Alpha gathered a team of in-country market specialists, native-language copywriters, designers, e-commerce store experts and project managers, all with very specialist knowledge about the fashion and retail industry.
Before long, the team had decided on a theme for each territory cleverly based on the local calendars, cultural information (including the ever-important dos and don’ts), and market research. Then, all that was needed from the client was beautiful pictures of all the items for sale and the stock level data. This was so Alpha could make sure that the right kinds of clothes were being highlighted at the right time of year, for the right country.
But, the work didn’t stop there. Alpha also performed SEO research for each territory and integrated those keywords into all the homepage copy written for each language. The result? A far more enjoyable shopping experience for customers around the world, thanks to homepages created especially for them, carefully crafted in their language and for their customs. For example, Alpha’s work for Arabic in the United Arab Emirates section of the website, as well as the targeted email campaigns, meant culturally sensitive and holiday content relevant to the religion-centric calendar.
Even the world’s greatest fashionistas can’t possibly know about every single local custom, festival, event and trend around the world, and that is where Alpha CRC comes in. By putting together a team of local, in-country specialists who have the necessary market research at their fingertips and are ready to fly into action, Alpha can and did create a campaign from scratch: writing copy, choosing appropriate items to focus on, and designing a homepage, banner and email that reflect and appeal to the latest happenings in the country and region.
After all, we don’t all celebrate events on the same date, or in the same way. Thanks to the team of in-country experts, this popular retailer learnt exactly what was popular and when, in each of the countries, to sell it.
And, even better, Alpha CRC did all the work for the retailer. They didn’t need to come up with snappy titles, fantastic layouts, or terrific text – Alpha’s copywriters created unique and eye-catching headings, text, and compositions for each country, and in each local language. And, you know what? It worked! Sales sky-rocketed for each of the locales treated to the Alpha CRC methods, and customer loyalty has been increasing ever since.
