E-EXPORT STRATEGY WITH THE T.O.S.C.A. FRAMEWORK

The website is a critical component of a company’s online presence. It acts as the primary point of contact for customers and prospects in both local and international markets, and it must be capable of effectively engaging internet users worldwide. To achieve this goal, companies must develop an effective e-export strategy and the T.O.S.C.A. methodology provides a simple and user-friendly approach for doing so.

T.O.S.C.A., NOT ONLY FOR OPERA LOVERS!

In January 2024, an average of over 66% of people around the world, and 99% in the most connected countries, were regularly accessing websites at home, at work, in stores, or on-the-go provided there was an active internet connection. That represents approximately 5.4 billion people! Yet, when comparing that number to the roughly two billion websites on the internet worldwide, the task of directing traffic to a new website might seem like searching for a needle in a haystack. The good news is that the mission of a website is not to be the best among about two billion! Its mission is to achieve a specific objective that compels only a specific audience in a specific country and not everybody around the world.

You must therefore concentrate your resources on the right foreign market, on the right objective, on the right channels, and on the right actions. This is the foundation of an effective digital e-export strategy! Unfortunately, that is too often treated lightly. Here is where the T.O.S.C.A. framework, not the opera, can help you define a good e-export strategy. This methodology is based on asking some simple questions. Let’s see which ones.

T: TARGET

Here is the first question: where do you want to export? The identification of the target foreign market must be done before anything else! It is the first step when planning an e-export strategy. You need to assess and rank the key foreign markets for your business based on these factors:

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data and future trends.
Direct and indirect competition.
Cultural and linguistic differences.
Political and financial stability.
Digital environment and local shopping behaviors.

However, with almost 200 countries in the world, you might ask yourself how… on earth … you are going to assess and rank them all. You do not have to, simply because there is no need to assess and rank them all! The next case study explains the best options for that.

CASE STUDY

1. To start with, you can use the free web tools to gather as much information as possible about the best foreign countries for your business.

2. You can also find relevant studies, reports, surveys and statistics on the internet, for free or for a relatively small fee. Try to find them by, first, setting the local Google parameters for the country you are interested in; then, by using specific keywords related to your sector in the local language. Based on the example of a home decoration company interested in selling to Spain, the keywords to use on google.es could be something like ‘estudio de mercado sector decoración hogar España’.

3. Additionally, you can hire an external consultant that can do tailored market research for you.

4. Moreover, you can contact chambers of commerce, and other economic and trade associations.

Once you have gathered sufficient data and looked at them from a bird’s-eye view, you should be able to shortlist the ten or so countries where your product or service has the highest potential for sales. Based on this list, you can now examine each country more closely and compare all the factors in the list above before making the final decision as to which target foreign market to invest in. This market-selection process may seem annoying to some, but it should not be, because selecting the wrong market is MUCH more annoying than that!

TIP

Your market analysis is never over! A successful export business is built on a strong rational plan. And, to be strong, the plan must be able to adapt to possible changes. Since a high-potential market at time T may become low-potential at time T+x, you need to stay observant at all times.

O: OBJECTIVE

Now that you have selected your target, you must answer the second question: what do you want to achieve there? All the classic SMART marketing and sales objectives are also valid for an e-export strategy, as long as they are more exact than just ‘selling online’. Some examples:

▪ Sell surplus items: a simple change in domestic demand can turn a best-seller product or service into a no-seller or a slow-seller, leaving a company with overstock that can have better sales in a foreign country.

▪ Extend life-cycles and manage seasonality: phased-out items often have new lives in other markets, opening new opportunities that would not otherwise be available at home. Also, selling abroad can allow you to flatten the fluctuations that you might have in your domestic market during specific seasons in the year.

▪ Achieve economies of scale: increasing production can improve the operational cost, which will increase profits of both domestic and export sales.

▪ Test different business models: even if you are successfully selling your product or service in your country on a fixed-price basis, other business models could also be as successful, like selling B2B instead of B2C, selling subscriptions instead of fixed prices, etc. Testing them abroad offers the advantage of minimizing the risk of disrupting your domestic business model!

S: SEGMENTS … AND PERSONAS

Once you have your target and your objective, you can answer the third question: what type of clients do you need to achieve your objective in the target foreign market? Many companies, when starting abroad, try to sell their products or services to anyone, thinking that if they do not do that, they will never get any customers! That is the wrong approach. It is not only expensive but also counterproductive, because it shows to the industry that you do not know who your customers are, which will eventually jeopardize your credibility with your key potential clients. Instead, before entering your target foreign market, you need to set your segmentation. That’s the only way for you to concentrate on and invest where the target customers are.

Customer segmentation requires large-scale quantitative research for grouping people (i.e., potential customers) based on their distinct needs and features. Segments are usually done based on demographic and psychographic data like age, gender, socio-professional category, lifestyle, location, hobbies, etc. It is important to keep in mind that a segment provides insights of a group of customers on a wide macro level, and not on a narrow micro level, which is what ‘personas’ do. A persona is a semi-fictional character created to simulate a real client’s behavior. It is made by analyzing and collecting data on real people’s behavior through one-to-one interviews or focus groups with the people in a specific segment group. It is the representation of a customer group that shares similar behaviors. So, even if segments and personas are both groups of customers, they are different. Where segmentation measures people in a group at a wide macro level, personas provide richer understanding at the real customer level by analyzing their context, emotional needs, motivations, behavior, and the associated threats/opportunities. Personas are part of segments, and different personas can be in the same segment.

CASE STUDY

For example, a German decoration business looking to export to Spain could come up with this type of profile for its persona – Catarina, the hectic single mom:

• Middle class

• Female, 46 years old, single with two daughters

• Lives in Bilbao

• History graduate, she works as museum curator at the Guggenheim Museum

• Homeowner of a downtown three-room apartment

• Personality: extrovert, creative, analytical, loyal, eco-friendly

• Interests: spending time with her kids, gatherings with friends, reading, art, interior design

• Goal: make her place comfortable and nice to enjoy with her kids and friends

• Lifestyle: hectic because she has all the kids and home responsibilities on top of her job

• Frustrations: lack of time and space for more home decoration and a mortgage to payback

• Shopping behavior: buys interior decoration items four to five times a year, always online, from a laptop. Quality is more important than price. Big Instagram user to follow home decoration influencers and trends

• Brand affinities: Habitat, Zara Home, Bemz, Domésticoshop, Deco&Lemon.

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The words segment and persona are often used synonymously to define customers. But, as we saw, they mean two different things, and you need both for your T.O.S.C.A.: you need to get your segmentation right, before building personas around it.

Do not jump into creating personas without an accurate segmentation exercise. For your e-export strategy, the combination of the data collected from the segmentation and the data gathered from the personalization helps you shape how a prospect – or persona – would behave on your website in his country.

C: CALL-TO-ACTION

The next question: when you have your target, your objective, your segments, what action do you want your personas to take when they arrive on your website? This answer allows you to set your call-to-action strategy. But what is a call-to-action? For websites, it is simply a hyperlink element, such as a button or a text, that is meant to trigger an instant reaction from a target audience and prompting them to click on it. This hyperlink element is most often made of words or short phrases that must compel your visitors to act in the specific way you want. The words or short phrases are usually imperative verbs such as ‘call now’, ‘read more’, ‘order today to get -50% off’, ‘request a demo’, etc. They have been used in marketing materials for long, and not only on websites but also on social media, flyers, emails, TV ads, etc. The advantage of digital calls-to-action compared to those on off-line marketing materials is that the triggered reactions are faster, and their performance is measurable almost immediately. Effective calls-to-action are those that convert visitors into leads and/or into customers!

For your digital e-export strategy, the important thing is not only to find the local best-performing words and phrases for your calls-to-action.

You must also make sure they are relevant to your local personas if you want to achieve the objective you set in the ‘O’ step.

For example, providing a podcast in English to prospective clients in Spain will bring a very small CTR! On the other hand, if the same content is offered in a video format with Spanish subtitles, the CTR will be in the average values.

So, call-to-action must be relevant for the specific combination of target-objective-segment/personas.

In this table, you have Some call-to-action CTR by industry in U.S., Canada, and U.K. in 2023 (source: MailerLite).

CASE STUDY

• Target: Germany.

• Objective: test the B2B channel of architects and interior designers for handmade couches.

• Segment: independent luxury architects and interior design studios, for whom the website is fully translated and presents videos showcasing some handmade couches from previous clients.

• Call-to-action:

–Download our quality chart.

–Schedule a video meeting with us.

–Download our mood-boards.

–Start your new couch with us.

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To track your calls-to-action performance you need to measure three metrics:

1. Click-through rate: the most important metric, it is the ratio of the number of people that clicked on the CTA to the number of people that have seen it, in %.

2. Submission rate: this is the percentage of the number of people that completed the action, i.e., filled out a form, to the number of people that clicked on it. It tells how well the CTA and the other steps work together.

3. Views to submission rate: it is the percentage of people that clicked on the CTA and completed the action that comes after their click on it to the people that have seen the CTA.

You need to track these three metrics for several months in your target foreign market to set your averages. You can then compare them with your industry averages in that country and with your home averages as well to determine whether your calls-to-action are successful or need further improvements.

A: ANALYTICS

Any strategy, in order to qualify as such, needs a precise measurement system to analyze the performance of each action undertaken to achieve the set objectives. It is the sole means by which one can know if the strategy is effective, or whether the actions need adjustments, or if they are unsuccessful. This also applies to your digital e-export strategy, and one of the best systems available to you is Google Analytics, the initial letter ‘A’ of which completes the T.O.S.C.A. acronym. Google Analytics is an ally to see the countries and languages that have traction for your digital e-export project. Yet, its potential extends far beyond that, assisting you in monitoring the KPIs of your international development and in enhancing the performance of your project. In the next case study, the most relevant considerations for e-export.

CASE STUDY

1) Events filtering for regions and countries

If you have translated your website into other languages, it will be interesting for you to understand how your German pages are browsed by your German visitors, how your Italian pages are browsed by your Italian visitors, and so forth. To do that, there was a great feature in Google Universal Analytics, that has been removed in GA4: ‘Views’. Why was that important? Views were used to collect data by custom segments that could then be filtered. For example, a view could correspond to the segment of a sub-directory website.com/de dedicated to Germany. Then, on that view, you could filter by demographics or set goals and conversions to measure the performance of website.com/de with no data from other geographies. Now that GA4 doesn’t have Views, you must use something else:

▪ Events and Filters: go to Reports > Engagement > Events. Then click on the little pencil on the top-right side of the page to customize the report.

▪ That will allow you to apply a Filter from the vertical menu on the right side of the page, which can be a country, a region, or a city (but also gender, age, and many more types).

▪ To create a report just for one country, click on Report Filter, then choose Include, and finally the country from the dropdown menu. Likewise, if you need a broader area, choose Exclude instead of Include, and select the countries you want to omit in the report. Since filters permanently alter the way data are shown, you must duplicate the report before applying a filter and name it in a way that it will remind you which one is not filtered and which one is. That is the only way to compare the original generic report with the new ones. All your reports will be in your GA4 library.

2) Segments

Unlike filters, they help you see subsets of your data without permanently altering the way data are shown. With segments you can narrow down your visitors’ data by different target areas and types of demographics, such as which URL they came from, which language they used, their age, in which city they live, etc. So, like Filters, Segments are paramount for measuring the performance of a website. Without them, your data will be too broad, and you will struggle to get useful insights. For example, it is easier to analyze the behavior of visitors coming from the German social media rather than the behavior of visitors coming from all acquisition channels worldwide! To set up a segment in GA4, click on Explore, then choose either an existing exploration, or a template, or create a new exploration.

But what are Explorations? They are enhanced reports that you can customize based on your key business metrics. Explorations allow you to access deeper data and advanced techniques, and for that reason they differ from the default reports under ‘Reports’. Once you have selected the type of Explorations, go to the Segments section on the left-side menu and click the plus sign. You will have two options: either to create a custom new segment by setting it up by yourself or to use a suggested segment, which is based on the most frequent use cases and can be adapted to your needs. In the first case, you can create a segment based on:

▪ Users: a group of users with specific criteria or behavior, such as shopping.

▪ Sessions: this type of segment includes the data for the users that have completed an event in a specific session.

▪ Events: segments with the data of users that completed a specific action. With this category you can specify the location where the event took place.

In the top panel, enter a name for your segment that will help you find it in GA4. Then click on Add new condition and on Geography to choose among City, Continent, Country, Region, and Subcontinent. You can add other conditions under other categories, such as Events, E-commerce, Links, Demographics, etc. For example, to get a better understanding of how French Canadians use your website, you can create a segment, name it ‘French-Canadian’, then select the language that contains ‘fr’ and the location that contains Canada as country. In the right-side column, you have the summary of the number of your visitors in this new customized segment: it helps you grasp whether the segment is correctly set up before saving it. Once you’ve saved it, it will be in GA4 with the other segments of your property. Another point about segments and filters is that with segments you can analyze your visitors even before the segment creation, while with filters you can only do that from after they’re created.

3) Ensure that Google Analytics properly handles your foreign traffic

Can Google Analytics mishandle traffic data? Yes! There are so many sources of international traffic, that GA4 can consider some of these sources as ‘referral’ rather than ‘organic’ sources. That is especially the case for other foreign search engines, which are all but ‘referral’ sources. To see if you’re concerned by this issue, check the list of source websites by going to Report > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Then change the ‘Session default channel grouping’ filter into Source or Source/Medium. That will show you the list of all your referral website. If you see search engines in this list, your analytics will be biased. In that case, go through the following tip for a solution.

TIP

If Google Analytics is considering some organic sources, such as other international search engines, as referral sources, open the Admin settings in the left bottom of your account, click on Data Streams in the property column and on the concerned stream.

Then in the Google Tag section, click on Configure Tag Settings. Under More Tagging Settings, click on List Unwanted Referrals.

First you need to choose the Match Type from five types of conditions:

Referral domain contains;
Referral domain begins with;
Referral domain ends with;
Referral domain exactly matches;
Referral domain matches RegEx, which is better not to touch.

Now you can add the search engines that you saw listed under ‘referral’. After that, Google Analytics should stop considering these sources as referral and start considering them as organic.

I say ‘should’ because for some search engines this change is not very precise. The best practice is therefore to check this report regularly.

This blog post is an excerpt from our latest book “Digital E-Export – E-Commerce, Marketplaces, SEO, SEA, Social Selling and E-Marketing”, now available on Amazon worldwide, click here!

Wondering how Digital E-Export can help your business grow in new markets? Contact us for a free 20-minute phone consultation. Email contact@towebornottoweb.com with the subject ’20-minute phone consultation’ to schedule it today!