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A Marketing Feature from Yappn: eCommerce that speaks to everyone
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Special to Financial Post | 27/11/13 | Last Updated: 27/11/13 1:05 PM ET
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The Internet has erased geographical barriers, allowing workers to telecommute and for people to communicate in real time as never before, but language and culture remain difficult obstacles, and when it comes to marketing, the world is shrinking quickly. Brands are looking to capture a global eCommerce market but are having challenges interacting with non-English speaking consumers, which can make up over 50% of online traffic with less than 1% conversion to sales due to the language barrier.
New York-based Yappn Corp. (OTCBB:YPPN), with offices in Toronto, is connecting individuals and corporations through social engagement across devices, platforms and languages in real time, allowing consumers to interact with brands in their native tongue. The key to global revenue for many companies is their ability to engage customers in any language when it comes to their eCommerce platform. Yappn believes that it has solved this problem.
“Language is probably the largest, last barrier for online communications,” says CEO and Founder David Lucatch. According to the 2011 census, over 66 million people (21% of the population) do not speak English at home. Over 67% of the world’s population surfs the net in a language other than English.
Companies have taken notice and have targeted their marketing campaigns accordingly. In May 2011, Subaru conducted an integrated marketing campaign aimed at Chinese-Americans, with videos on its Chinese-language YouTube site and Cantonese and Mandarin print ads running in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Global brands such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Tylenol and IBM market heavily in China.
Meanwhile, the Hispanic market in the U.S. is valued at $1.2 trillion. In 2011, Walmart set out to double its multicultural marketing and was awarded the inaugural Marketer of the Year award by AHAA: The Voice of Hispanic Marketing. Nissan spent $35 million of its advertising budget on Hispanic marketing in 2012, while Ram Trucks and Pepsi use Latin American stars in their advertising.
Closer to home, TD Bank was the most popular choice for opening new accounts among newly arrived Canadians from Chinese and South Asian countries in 2011. With Canada taking in an average of 245,613 immigrants per year, marketers believe that the two day window after arrival is the most crucial time to convert new arrivals into customers. Competition among banks for this market is fierce.
And now the challenge for 2013-2014 is to market to globalized millennials, with marketing campaigns blurring the lines between linguistic and cultural groups, as hybrid languages such as Taglish and Singlish gain in popularity, not to mention the increasing dominance of the pop charts by K-Pop and Bollywood stars. Recently, at the YouTube Video Awards, a stunned audience fell silent as a K-Pop group took the honours for video of the year, beating out the likes of Lady Gaga and others. The global audience has truly arrived.
Yappn, out to change the way global eCommerce is done, is currently working with a number of dynamic U.S. brand leaders who are looking to expand their eCommerce activities to both a larger domestic, non-English speaking and global audience. This is new territory for potentially lucrative revenue and additional sales in a new market segment for these brands, and so Yappn has developed a business model that delivers its eCommerce multi-language service platform at no upfront cost to qualified brands (with at least $2 Million in annual online sales), beginning with one to three languages, and employing an affiliate-style, revenue-sharing model, averaging 12% to 15% of sales beyond a certain point with the possibility of integrating up to 70 languages. The no-cost initiation allows businesses to tap into an entirely new non-English speaking market without having to hire multi-lingual staff and incurring significant technology costs, as Yappn’s tool sets are already in commercial use in other market segments.
Yappn also provides unique social engagement components that allow customers to chat with each other, review and engage a brand’s social media in up to 70 languages. Yappn Tools also delivers analytics as to who is using your platform, according to language and location demographics, allowing brands to understand their global audience and to position products and services on a geographic basis. Brands don’t have to invest and install new software, as they retain the eCommerce platform they are currently using, while engaging non-English domestic and international markets with Yappn’s tool sets.
eCommerce has grown 13% annually over the last five years, and is forecast to grow 77% in North America and Western Europe between 2011 and 2016, while growing 146% in Latin America and 197% in Asia Pacific during the same timeframe. So while the need to sell online is urgent for English-only retailers, an even greater reward awaits those who can tap the non-English markets that are set to explode.
The controlling shareholder of Yappn, Canadian Technology Incubator, Intertainment Media Inc. (TSXV:INT) has another company, Ortsbo, a commercial real-time language services platform specializing in creating programs for large Business Process Outsourcing companies in the global customer care space. Ortsbo holds the Guiness world record for “most nationalities in an online chat room” set in May 20, 2011, with a total of 92 logged in simultaneously (four discounted for not being recognized as UN member states: Hong Kong, Macao, Puerto Rico and Taiwan) during a KISS-themed chat moderated by Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Ortsbo is the engine that powers Yappn’s simultaneous translation capabilities.
Yappn has already successfully deployed programs with companies like Disney for their latest films Thor, The Dark World and Disney’s new animated feature Frozen, creating global game-like programs and live, global, multi-lingual chats integrating with social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others.
Yappn’s online chat platform has grown its user base more than 1,700% since the end of October, through the Yappn chat platform’s pilot program, featuring above average metrics for user engagement. The chat forums are furthermore segmented according to interest, rather than by language or location, which opens the possibility for tremendous growth in topic-driven engagement across cultures and languages. The Yappn chat platform can be embedded directly into a brand’s website.
Yappn’s social engagement and eCommerce tools allow brands to “build once and deploy everywhere”, embedding social media and real-time marketing into existing platforms. “Yappn will continue to evolve, define itself and create new areas of revenue as globalization engagement by conventional and online brands becomes a continuing high priority in the race to expand opportunities and dominate worldwide business activities,” says Lucatch.
