4 builders who never spoke to each other · contested
Follow the language your users already speak
Analytics will show which countries and interface languages your users cluster in, and the largest one may be nowhere near home, which makes translating and marketing there the cheapest expansion available. Pointing the existing site at a new country works far less well than building something designed for that market.
Where this splits
Analytics pointing at a dominant foreign market is treated as an obvious expansion, while another builder found localisation was a recurring cost that small new markets never covered.
4 claims against 1
Alan Nguyen · Glen Allsopp · Preetam Nath
Translate toward the market your users cluster in
- 01Use in-product analytics to find which countries and interface languages your users cluster in, then translate and market towards whichever one is largest, even if it is nowhere near your home market.
- 02Entering a new country works better when you build experiences designed for that market rather than pointing the existing site at it.
Localisation is a recurring cost small markets never cover
Translating the product is a recurring cost, not a one off one, and small new markets rarely cover it.
- 03Do not skip merchants who do not share your language; run the support conversation through machine translation and serve them anyway.
- 04When an app earns nothing, translating it and opening additional country stores is a cheap first lever to pull.
What it returned
- 150%
NerdWallet reported Canadian monthly unique users up 150% year on year after launching several experiences aimed specifically at Canada, in a quarter of record numbers across nearly every traffic and brand metric they track.
Analytics showed Brazil and Portuguese as the dominant country and language, which pointed towards translating the whole app and pushing harder in Brazil.
Seomator spent significant time and money on localisations, then found keeping several languages current cost more again and the new markets did not deliver enough customers to be profitable.
Google Translate carried conversations with more than a hundred Shopify merchants from over ten nationalities, spanning Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, China and others.
Sources
- NerdWallet Traffic, Revenue & SEO Playbook (2023) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Tracking Traffic and Financials Going Forward · 2023-08-03
- Habitify: From $0 in 6 months to 1M downloads and $21K/monthAlan Nguyen · failory.com · Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business? · undated
- Growing a SaaS to $4k/month in a Highly Competitive MarketNick Sawinyh · failory.com · During the process of building & growing Seomator, which were the worst mistakes you committed? · undated · dissenting
- How I grew my Shopify micro SaaS to 2000+ users in 40 daysPreetam Nath · preetamnath.com · Analytics for Shopify apps · 2019-12-29
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
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