Internet domain registrar and web hosting company GoDaddy is seeing almost half of their new clientele coming from Tier 2 and 3 cities in India due to the rise of e-commerce. The company says that their local language strategy has been the driver of this base. Their long-term plans include engagement with Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to a greater extent.
“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 localization strategy to unlock the opportunity India’s linguistic diversity presents and increase internet uptake among SMBs,” said Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Office, GoDaddy.
Their multilingual approach seeks to eliminate the language barrier and make the internet easy to embrace for the 73 per cent of the non-English speaking SMBs located in India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities to reach 1 million customers this year. The multilingual strategy is being increasingly adopted by global internet and technology giants like Microsoft, Google and Facebook to tap the next billion Indian internet users.
Aldrich noted that overall there has been a growth in the payments sector, due to increased adoption, advancement, and availability of smartphones, and due to demonetisation in the country. With Indians in smaller towns accounting for around 41 per cent of all online shoppers as per ReedSeer Consulting, they are increasingly becoming the driving force behind e-commerce in India. “ Approximately 50 per cent of visitors on GoDaddy’s India website are from Tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Similarly, almost 50 per cent of our new customers come from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities,” he adds.
“We are continuously working towards building awareness of online adoption among our partner ecosystem through marketing campaigns and providing products and customer care in multiple local languages for Tier 1 and Tier 2 markets, while also conducting on ground training and community development initiatives,” he said. A Target Group Index (TGI) report suggests that as much as 61 per cent of India’s prolific internet growth is now coming from its regional belts and 73 per cent of small businesses are located in India’s Tier 2 and 3 cities.
GoDaddy's product offerings are now available in 4 Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and English. The company's customer care services are available in over 5 languages (including Telugu) in India. GoDaddy's awareness campaigns are running in over 7 different languages (including Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam) to help drive education and thought leadership in the local areas of the country.