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Global Experience (GX) 102: Why Your Product Strategies Need to be Global

Written by Elly Lee | June, 27, 2022

This week, we’re exploring why and how GX can optimize your product strategies. In today’s digital global market, one of the most important aspects of optimizing product reach and functionality is localization. Without it, customers have little to no opportunity to understand let alone engage with your product.

 

Why Your Product Strategies Need to be Global

56% of customers say having product information in their native language is more important than price. Across product details, reviews, UX design, and more, localization is critical to building an inclusive product that all customers — regardless of what language they speak — can use and find value in. Below are some important GX benefits that directly impact your product teams:

  1. Improving conversion rates

  2. Scaling product usability for new markets

  3. Increasing inclusivity through language accessibility

     

Improving conversion rates

Localization allows prospects and customers to truly understand your product. As global customers become more educated about your product, what it does, and how it works, customers can make highly informed decisions faster and more easily. Ultimately, this leads to higher conversion rates, retention rates, and brand loyalty.

Scaling product usability for new markets

One of the main benefits of a global experience strategy is improving product functionality. Offering your product in multiple languages not only ensures that every customer can engage with your product, but also significantly improves the user experience by maximizing comfort and cultural relevance. Whether you localize your product based on color, text, design, etc., thoughtful modifications ensure that your product meets customer expectations in every market. 

Increasing inclusivity through language accessibility

Inclusive product language can take your global customer experience to the next level. Localizing your product allows global and multilingual communities to gain access to your brand and ensures that all customers are empowered to find success and satisfaction with your product. 

 

How to Take Your Product Strategies Global

There are a number of ways to implement GX strategies into your product strategies. Here, we’ll go over a few basic strategies that your product team can start out with:

  1. Understand target languages and markets

  2. Identify what content to localize

  3. Build a product design and glossary guide

  4. Set up your content for success

Understand target languages and markets

Targeting new locales requires thorough research into a region’s commonly used phrases, technologies, currencies, units of measurement, and more. Consider learning the market’s technologies and behaviors to optimize your product experience. For example, if you’re in charge of a new product feature in India, you’ll want to focus heavily on the mobile user experience for that region since 89% of people access the internet on a mobile phone.

Identify what content to localize

While the most effective global experience strategies consider the entire end-to-end customer journey, each product team might have a different starting point. Customers often engage with different types of product content, so it’s important to understand what types of content-specific audiences prefer. 

For example, if customers are making decisions about whether to purchase your product or service, they will likely be focused on product descriptions, reviews, user manuals, and more. On the other hand, if they’re already customers, they’ll probably be most interested in new product features and updates. 

Depending on your priorities and objectives, your localized content should align with those goals. If your company is looking to prioritize reach, your strategy might be different than a company that’s trying to increase product engagement within a multilingual audience.

Build a product design and glossary guide

Product design and glossary guides are vital to building a cohesive customer experience. A design guide ensures that the product or UX design considers differences in text size/length and adheres to cultural neutrality when it comes to colors, icons, buttons, and forms. A glossary guide also makes it easier and faster for your linguists to localize text within your product.

Set up your content for success

Products are constantly changing. Rethinking product development to include localization as a strategic part of the process earlier on can help create a workflow that is scalable and time-saving in the long run. On top of that, building a strategy focused on global experience will ensure that content is continuously updated so all customers can see the most up-to-date localized copy. To do so, product teams should help make sure changes in internationalized source codes work in every market. 

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An engaging global experience strategy not only enhances, but also humanizes your brand to international customers. Ready to elevate your brand with an engaging global experience strategy? Reach out to Lilt for a personalized consultation.