Jilko is a home decoration business which sells fitted furniture and other home items. It is based in Belgium and offers Scandinavian-influenced furniture from 15 boutique brands.
Jurgen Hollebecq created the company with his wife in Belgium. He is a web designer by trade so he handles the online aspects of the business.
I built jilko.be for ourselves: I already created a lot of websites and webshops for customers but we combined this experience with the love for the Scandinavian design of my wife Hilke.
We created a multilingual webshop because we are based in Belgium. It’s a small but quite a complex country with 3 official languages: Dutch, French and German. The German part is quite small (and we don’t speak it ourselves) but we needed Dutch and French. We also want to target other countries besides Belgium, so we needed an English version too. This is how we can target the whole of Europe now.
WPML is a handy tool as you don’t need to set up a site for each language. A lot of product data (like prices, inventory etc) is automatically “synced” between all languages of the website, that’s quite a time saver for us!
We don’t run Google Ads, so we focus on the organic search results of the SERPs. We really focused on this, which results in better rankings for multiple brands if you search for a brand name in combination with “webshop” or “buy online”, than the brand itself 🙂 Next to that, my wife is very active on our social media. Every day she creates beautiful lifestyle photos or collages which results in quite some likes and feedback from our followers. Hence a lot of people check the linked page on our website.
The primary activity of our company was building websites but actually, our webshop is a 2nd business we built. It needed a lot of investment (both time and money) but we keep on growing and our turnover looks promising. Hence we bring new Scandinavian brands to our webshop, so there are always new items to discover. Often, people are asking us when we will open a “real” store where you can come shopping. That might be a good thing for the future but nowadays we stay focused on our webshop and some pop-up projects 🙂
Hot Screen is a Swedish company which produces high quality, environmentally-friendly heat transfers to customers around Europe. It currently offers four languages (Germany, Swedish, Finnish and English).
Philip Tornberger is part of the company’s graphic design and web customer service team.
Why did you decide to build a multilingual website and how has it affected your business?
When we chose to expand our business to other countries (northern Europe in particular) we came to the conclusion that we had to have our website in several languages.
80% of our business is still in Sweden so the change to a multilingual website hasn’t affected us as much as we would like, but we notice that our international customers appreciate the feature of being able to order from us in their native language.
What features of a multilingual website have you enjoyed/benefited from?
Technically speaking I like how easy it is to switch between languages when making updates to the website, it makes it easier to make sure that the website is updated continuously on all languages.
What is your approach to attracting new clients digitally (newsletters, blogging, promotions or any other methods)?
We have just recently started to dig into digital marketing and we are currently sending newsletters via a third party application, we have also tried targeted advertising via Google to attract more international customers to our translated websites.
Soon we are planning to start a social networking campaign on Facebook and LinkedIn with content marketing such as instructional videos, tips & tricks and dos & don’ts when applying our products and such.
What are the common tools or plugins that you use?
We have only tried WPML for the purpose of making our website multilingual. We have hired translators for all of our multilingual text on our website and that works very well for us.
How important was it to localize your website for each customer (offering a different version for Irish customers compared with the British website for example)?
Our website is available in four languages (Swedish, English, German and Finnish). So far we have only translated our website into languages which have a substantial customer base. But our goal is to keep translating our website into more languages as we keep on expanding.
When did you decide to expand your business outside your home country and what did you do to accomplish it?
We decided to expand to other countries when we became market leaders in the field of producing heat transfers in Sweden and we wanted to see if we could do the same in other countries as well. To establish this, we have started affiliated companies in every country we have chosen to invest in and hired sales representatives for these companies. We are also trying to reach a larger base of customers in these countries by digital advertisement through google.
If you had any advice for a business starting to build a multilingual website what would it be?
To work with a really good translation agency or hire people that speak the language you would like to translate your website to.
Juliette Tent Vacations offers camping holidays in France and The Netherlands in customized luxury holiday tents.
The owner and director Edward van Fessem gave the feedback via the web designer Gerson Fitié.
Why did you decide to build a multilingual website and how has it affected your business?
Juliette Tent Vacations started operating in the Dutch market only. Because that’s quite a small market with a lot of competition, we decided later on it would be wise to expand our service to surrounding countries as well. For that, we didn’t need much more than a website that offers multiple languages. We have a close relationship with E-CAT.nl, the company that developed our website and they chose WPML to make the website and booking engine multilingual. Besides Dutch, we now also offer English and German. After a while, the bookings from Germany and the UK came in. Our largest customer base is still in the Netherlands, but attracting people from other countries was a very wise decision and made sure we expanded our business.
What features of a multilingual website have you enjoyed/benefited from?
People feel more comfortable when they can read in their own language. A site visitor from Germany or Ireland who visits our website is much more eager to make a booking of course if he can read all information in their language.
What is your approach to attracting new clients digitally (newsletters, blogging, promotions or any other methods)?
Almost everyone wants to go on a holiday sooner or later, so potentially everyone is a customer! We try to attract new customers via multiple ways of budget-friendly marketing. Printed media is quite expensive, and the conversion is often too low. We try to get the most out of our advertising budget via newsletters, SEO, Facebook and promotions. Also by way of working together with third parties. Best is word of mouth. Many new customers heard about Juliette Tent Vacations via friends and family who had stayed with us before. I’m proud to say that many customers have booked with us before. Some even book every year with us.
What are the common tools or plugins that you use?
For this question I asked web developer Gerson Fitié from E-CAT: For the booking engine, we use Pinpoint Booking System Pro. It is a great engine which is easily customized to fit the design of the website. Also, very important, it works flawlessly with WPML. Each customer completes the booking process in his or her own language. Yoast SEO is used to optimize the site, so people find it easily via Google. The plugin WP Super Cache makes the site very fast, by caching the pages in the memory. Worth mentioning as well is the plugin Relevanssi, which much improves the WordPress search with a relevance-sorting search.
Dualoo allows you to manage job applicants and email recruitment for available positions. With Dualoo, you can create tailor-made application processes for different jobs.
Lukas Locher is part of the finance and support team at Dualoo.
Why did you decide to build a multilingual website and how has it affected your business?
Dualoo is a Swiss-based software company that builds a cloud hr software for small and middle-sized companies. We are helping our customers to find the best talents for their company. We are selling our software as a service. This means that it is important to scale our business model as fast and inexpensive as possible.
At the moment our main priority in selling Dualoo is Switzerland, but we want to be ready and prepared when entering surrounding countries such as Germany or Austria someday soon. Switching from a single language website to a multilingual website is a big task and concerning SEO not so easy (e.g. all URL’s are changing). To make that step as early as possible was one of our major reasons why we wanted to build a multilingual website. To be exact, it is a multiregional website for Switzerland, Germany and Austria. That means that our whole website is in German, but with some difference between the countries.
Because of our focus on the Swiss market, we do not see much impact at the moment. But still, it was interesting to see how our traffic from Germany and Austria increased after the installment of WPML.
What is your approach to attracting new clients digitally (newsletters, blogging, promotions or any other methods)?
We are approaching our potential customers in different ways – online and offline. The more interesting way is of course online. There are a lot of possibilities to automate the process. In the last few months, we were building a lot of landing pages with different topics. The goal of these pages is to generate leads and process them until they register for our demo account (this happens via mail). If a lead visits our website several times it then turns hot and our sales team gets a notification on Slack. Before that point, our sales team has nothing to do. This is important to us because our resources are limited. To automate this, we are using different sales tools:
Salesforce:
It’s the heart of our sales team. All data is stored there – from a lead to a contact and existing customer.
We are using Autopilot with its journey to automate the lead generation process via mail. It is connected to Salesforce via API and collects its data from there. That means if a new lead via the website is added it directly starts the right campaign. You can do everything with Autopilot.
Saleswings is a Swiss startup as well. They are selling a software, which helps you to prioritize your leads. For our process, it is a very important tool, because it decides when our sales team has to contact possible new customers. It has a Salesforce-Plugin where you can see all the visited pages and much more from every lead in Saleswings.
For companies who already signed up for our software, we are using Intercom to stay in contact with them.
Of course, we are using other tools like MailChimp for our newsletter and our social media accounts (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Xing).
What are the common tools or plugins that you use?
We are using Avada Theme as our basis. Since we started our website we did a lot of custom enhancement (mostly on design). We always try to use as few WordPress plugins as possible. But the use of plugins makes our lives a lot easier. We are using the following plugins at the moment:
Brilliant Web-to-Lead for Salesforce
This plugin imports the leads from our website to Salesforce. It is very easy to use and has a lot of functionality. Like its name says: it is brilliant!
We are using this plugin for speed optimization. Make sure that your hoster supports this plugin and uses SDD as storage. This will give you even more speed.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most important plugins on our website. We are handling all SEO-related stuff with this plugin.
UpdraftPlus is our backup software. We are generating an update every week.
This plugin manages all 301-Redirection. This plugin is important when you are switching to a multilingual website.
WPML
And last but not least: WPML. We are using WPML for distributing our website to three countries.
How important was it to localize your website for each customer (offering a different version for Irish customers compared with the British website for example)?
Your visitors need a warm welcome on your website. Otherwise, they are gone as fast as they came to your website. When your content is not exactly what your visitors want they will exit your website. In our market, there are a lot of different words for the same thing. Especially between Switzerland, Germany and Austria, there is a lot of difference in wording. That is the reason why we decided to implement WPML for our multiregional website.
When did you decide to expand your business outside your home country and what did you do to accomplish it?
Like I said at the beginning, our main priority is Switzerland at the moment. But by the time we decide to enter other markets like German and Austria and sell Dualoo actively we want to be ready and all set up.
SunWorks supplies a wide selection of solar PV energy products for the leisure market. They have been specialists in solar panels for motorhomes, narrowboats, yachts and caravans since 2002.
Tony Weldon is part of the sales team at SunWorks.
Why did you decide to build a multilingual website and how has it affected your business?
We are selling in the UK and aiming for France at the moment. We’ll try for Spain and other countries later. It’s been worthwhile but there is a lot of work translating everything. We are getting sales so we are optimistic.
Why did you choose WPML?
By recommendation. It was a good choice. Very comprehensive and thorough.
What features of a multilingual website have you enjoyed/benefited from?
The management. It’s easy to see what has been translated already and what still needs to be done.
What is your approach to attracting new clients digitally (newsletters, blogging, promotions or any other methods)?
We use our blog and then Twitter and Facebook. We are also building a mailing list.
What are the common tools or plugins that you use?
Yoast SEO Premium, of course. Several others including Jetpack, OIK Shipping, Google Analytics, W3 Total Cache, PDF Invoices, various contact forms, etc.
When did you decide to expand your business outside your home country and what did you do to accomplish it?
We started on the FR site about two years ago. We have other links with France, there’s a big market there for us and so it made sense. We use the same methods as per our UK site and it’s beginning to pay off.
If you had any advice for a business starting to build a multilingual website what would it be?
Make sure you have a strong market in the countries in which you are interested. You will have to translate all your English into the new language of course and it’s a lot of work. So you must be sure that it’s going to be worthwhile.