Specsavers: a multinational optical retailer
Specsavers Optical Group Ltd has been a family-run business for over 30 years, working together with store partners to provide the best value optometry, audiology and other healthcare service for customers.
With more than 32,500 employees and 2,000 stores, you can find Specsavers outlets across the globe in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Australia and New Zealand.
The Challenge
Specsavers, an optometry and audiology company with a strong global presence, wanted to increase website performance in the Netherlands and Nordic regions. Despite already having multilingual websites in local languages, Specsavers wanted to enhance them further by improving engagement on product detail pages.
Each of these challenges impacted Specsavers from increasing online growth in the Netherlands and Nordic regions - as users could find them, but did not stay engaged. So the Specsavers team decided to improve content on the product detail pages by adding frame descriptions, and selected a new transcreation partner, Acolad.
The Specsavers Global Web Team knew that several challenges needed to be addressed:
- Low dwell time (Time spent between clicking the website link on a search engine results page (SERP) to clicking back to the SERP)
- High bounce rate
- Low conversion to online sales/booked appointments
- Translation requiring more local expertise
Acolad is great to work with and really understands our challenges. They’re very flexible, acting as an extension of our team, but offering a level of expertise we don’t have internally.
Hannah Ellis
Global Brand Marketing Team, Specsavers
The Solution
The Acolad and Specsavers teams worked together to test one of Acolad’s digital marketing services: transcreation.
The purpose was to compare the result of the transcreation service versus standard translation of the region’s website content, focusing on the frame descriptions on the website product detail page. In essence, Acolad performed A/B testing to find out what resonates with the end user and prove ROI to Specsavers for the additional investment.
Drawing from experience across many international brands, Acolad proposed transcreation as the solution to reach higher engagement and conversion rates.
Typically, marketing-based web content calls for a more creative translation to accurately portray brand personality and engage the audience. Transcreation maintains the flair, style and voice of the content but culturally adapts it into the desired languages – Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian.
The correctly transcreated content effectively communicates Specsavers brand and value proposition to their target audiences in a natural sounding way, almost as if it was written by a native speaker.
The Result
It can be hard finding the perfect pair of frames that makes someone feel the right balance of confidence and sophistication. The same can be said about building an international brand – finding the right balance between the need to have a global positioning combined with local relevance.
For Specsavers, they found their balance and global success opting for transcreation with Acolad. By transcreating the frame descriptions on the website product detail page, Specsavers was able to solve their website localization challenges.
Ultimately, the investment in language had an undeniable impact on user engagement, with Specsavers achieving an overall increase in website engagement for the Netherlands and Nordic regions.
20%
Bounce Rate
60%
Conversion Rate
20sec
Dwell Time
Supporting global marketing teams through a strategic partnership is a top initiative here at Acolad. Our digital marketing team are great at providing pragmatic measurable solutions to help our global clients meet and exceed their marketing KPIs, and we did just that for Specsavers.
Grainne Maycock
VP Sales, Acolad
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