Only 15% of SurveyMonkey’s revenue came from outside the United States in 2010. After 5 years, we’re at 45% (17 languages and 28 currencies) and in the top 500 on Alexa.
Here are some tips from Selina Tobaccowala, formerly the President and CTO at SurveyMonkey, for growing your business by entering new international markets:
1. Investing in a country-specific domain is essential for search engine rankings.
English is roughly 1.5 times shorter than the average language (affects your UI).
Third, livelier and busier homepages are popular with Japanese users.
Fourth, the most important content for each market should be tailored specifically for that market (a literal translation won’t do).
Payments vary fifthly (bank transfer in Germany, Carte Bleu in France, etc.)
Sixth, taxation is unique.
7. More and more people are visiting websites from more than one device. When determining prices, in particular, A/B testing based on actual users rather than cookies should be used.
8. The value of one currency relative to another is subject to constant change.
9. Customers from other countries are understandably wary about the location of their data being stored (keep local data local).
Ten. Android has an over 80% share of the global market.
There are 9 times as many smart phone users outside the US as there are in the US itself (188 million vs. 1.6 billion), and the annual growth rate is twice as high (12% vs. 24%).