Importance of Investing in Local Language Translations

Launching into new marketplaces with Amazon is an opportunity to reach millions of new customers to either test responsiveness to your products before making significant investments or grow bottom line sales. Considering the products and services Amazon has to offer, the barrier to entering a new market is relatively low vs establishing owned and operated website and logistics. An often overlooked item is correct and accurate language translations for listings and content. Doing this badly can be worse than simply listing products in English for other EU locales.

Basic Machine Translation Services?

If you care about brand perception, want to inform consumers on the benefits of your product and need to convert browsers into purchasers, standard online tools such as Google Translate are inadequate. Even for everyday products such as baby Car Seats, Google will translate this literally to Autositz. If you research how German’s search for car seats they will use the term Kindersitz. Based on shopper search data, kindersitz ranks more than 6x higher than autositz in frequency of use. By using tools such as Google Translate your product listings will not be discoverable to shoppers and will likely have low conversion rates.

Correct translations will improve conversion rates and help customers understand what they are buying, reducing product returns and negative feedback.

Value and Impact of Investing in Human Translations?

Part of a strategy to launch into new marketplaces with foreign language should be an investment into properly curated content and translations.

• Improve Marketing Efficiency – the team at Acorn-i partnered with a nutrition brand selling on Amazon.de. An incumbent agency had launched and run Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns generating an ACoS of 310%. Via making immediate changes to only keywords and campaign targeting the ACoS reduced to 80% within 72hrs while driving increased total sales. It’s critical your advertising copy and targeting are correctly set up for success.

• Search Results Ranking – more than 70% of visits to the Amazon homepage start at the search box and most shoppers do not click past page one of the search results. A product needs to compete for this high-value retail space via paid media or organic ranking. Using correct keywords in your product title and description will be the difference between being seen or unseen by a potential customer.

• Amazon ‘New and Most Interesting Products’ – category pages will include featured products that are e.g. top-rated, most wished for. For newly launched products Amazon may select them to feature in ‘new and most interesting’. Acorn-i launched a snacking brand into Amazon.it and within the first week secured placements within this section. The brand had not experienced this before having already launched into two other markets.

• Amazon Badges – for products achieving high traffic and sales Amazon will often append a badge on the Detail Page listing e.g. ‘Amazon Choice’ or ‘#1 Best Seller’. These products will appear at or close to the top of search results pages, in turn driving more traffic and sales. Poor listing structure and incorrect translations will leave your listing with little to no chance of securing one of these badges.

38% of EU residents state they have sufficient skills in English to have a conversation. Listing in local language is essential in driving sales at scale.

Translations Need Localisation

Translating source text into local language is important but will be greatly enhanced by localisation. Shoppers search for items using colloquial terms and one country can have multiple dialects. Localisation takes into account broader nuances such as societal etiquette, geographical references, date and time formatting, social values, regional specificity. Leveraging services such as Google Translate or Amazon Listing Translation will provide a framework but to create the most effective listing to drive sales and represent your product and brand a language specialist will be well worth the investment.

Localised advertisements out perform English-only advertisements by more than 80%

Acorn-i provide human translations for European markets UK, DE, FR, IT, ES as well as into US, CA and AU for Brands and Sellers wishing to expand into these locales.