Going Global: Tips for Optimizing International E-commerce Localization Campaigns

Key elements of localized international campaigns

Campaign calendar

In global commerce, there’s no universal marketing calendar. Different regions have their own holidays, cultural events and even seasons and weather conditions (affecting merchandising strategies). Products can launch at different times in different markets, with some areas excluded from a given release.

Language and copy

Localized lingo boosts customer acquisition, conversion rate and customer retention. But the cleverer your marketing headlines and copy, the easier it is to get “lost in translation” across regions. Be mindful of local pop culture references, slang, and idioms. Getting cultural nuances wrong can damage your brand or harm conversion. It’s always recommended to have a native speaker review and approve all localized copy.

Campaign creative

Consider designing localized posters, web banners, lifestyle images and ads tailored to cultural context and preferences.

Product data

Data like pricing, description copy, sizing and units of measure, shipping methods and costs, attributes, and tags, and even images often require localized treatment, especially where pricing can differ across markets within a country, such as telecom, grocery and B2B manufacturing.

Merchandising

What products to include in a sale event or thematic promotion can be different across markets and regions. This impacts what gets featured in email, home page banners and in-store promotions, and how you apply merchandising rules to categories and search.

Marketing channels

Provided you have a geo-segmented list, optimizing your email and SMS for local languages and campaigns requires dedicated planning and production, but can pay dividends in additional sales and loyalty. Similarly, social and ad networks need their own localized treatments.

Promotions

Different regions may require different discount logic, coupon codes and restrictions. These requirements must be carefully planned for, tested, and rolled out across the digital product and marketing campaigns.

Planning your international campaign strategy

Start with the ground rules

Document what requirements are “untouchable” with respect to compliance, and what needs to be centrally managed to ensure each local strategy stays within your guardrails. Include tone and branding, and any supplier related conditions that may impact strategy and execution.

Leverage analytics

Dig into your geo-segmented data for insights that influence your regional strategy. For example, including or excluding certain product categories or brands, choosing price points and offers, launching on specific days of the week, or investing more effort in certain marketing channels.

Prioritize

To optimize operational efficiency, decide which markets have the most value and deserve the most love. For lower-priority markets, determine where you can leverage shared languages and reuse assets, and where you can’t.

Within each geo-segment, plan and prioritize which channels (owned, paid, and partnered) will be involved, what content and creative needs to be baked into each online and offline channel, and who will be responsible for delivery of each asset.

Crafting your execution plan

Determine your data and business logic

Plan for how data and business logic will be applied to your digital commerce product, including what needs to be updated in your catalog, PIM, site search, personalization engine and back-end code or orchestration layer.

Here’s where having a flexible, headless commerce environment can help, especially when it comes to complex promotions, pricing, payments and tax requirements. Customized rules can be built, tested, and applied for a specific campaign quickly, and rolled back just as fast post-event.

Optimize your workflow

Look for opportunities to plug leaks in your workflow efficiency, and leverage technology where you can. Where can business rules help automate product attribution and categorization? How can generative AI help you scale production? What tools can help you schedule creative cutovers in advance? Where can APIs help sync real time data across systems, eliminating manual effort?

Your goal is to enable more production with less friction. Scrutinize your process and data from end-to-end, prioritize which projects or products are top priority, add more effective resources (e.g., new roles, platforms, or AI/automation), and redesign more effective workflows. For example:

Online products go through multiple teams and touchpoints prior to reaching ‘live’ status when they become visible to customers. Product data must be entered manually into several different PIM systems and databases as not all systems talk to each other (and sometimes neither do the teams responsible for them). Optimizations may include consolidating resources to a more centralized team or migrating platform data to a singular source of truth. If processes are bogging down time to market, consider using automation or semi-automation to speed things up.

Budget enough time for prep and production

Avoid last-minute, unhappy surprises by giving your team enough runway to deliver. Glitches like translated copy no longer fitting component design, inventory shortages and IT backlogs can spoil an otherwise seamless campaign. Working with reduced staff or decentralized teams can also stretch out a project.

Outsourcing your campaign operations to an experienced and well-staffed team can help you hit your deadlines and Infosys Equinox’ Digital Commerce Marketing Operations group more than 99% record of on-time schedule adherence, and can help you launch 50% faster at a cost savings of over 40%.

Want to learn more about we can help your team execute impeccable international marketing campaigns? Write to us at contactus@infosysequinox.com and we will get in touch with you.