GoDaddy’s go-local strategy pays off

Internet domain registrar and web hosting company GoDaddy is seeing almost half of their new clientele coming from tier-II and -III cities due to the rise of e-commerce. The company says their local language strategy has been the driver of this base. Their longterm plans mainly include engagement with small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Supporting our customers in India and being available to help them as they create an online presence for their venture have been the key elements of our value proposition. We have designed our localisation strategy to unlock the opportunity that India’s linguistic diversity presents and increase internet uptake among small and medium businesses (SMBs),” said Steven Aldrich, chief product office, GoDaddy.

Their multilingual approach seeks to eliminate the semantic barrier and make the internet easy to embrace 73 per cent of non-English speaking SMBs in the tier-II and tier-III cities to reach beyond their 1 million customers this year. The multilingual strategy is being increasingly adopted by global internet and technology giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook to tap the next billion Indian internet users.

According to Aldrich, there has been an overall growth in the payments sector due to increased adoption, advancement and availability of smartphones and demonetisation. With Indians in smaller towns accounting for around 41 per cent of all online shoppers according to ReedSeer Consulting, they are increasingly becoming the driving force behind e-commerce in India. “Around 50 per cent of the visitors on GoDaddy's India website are from the tier-II and tier-III cities. Almost 50 per cent of our new customers come from the tier-II and tier-III cities,” he said.