opinion

Why Accepting Multi-currency Matters for Optimal Geotargeting

Why Accepting Multi-currency Matters for Optimal Geotargeting

Imagine you are sitting in your home office looking at a paysite and thinking of getting a membership, browsing the images and reading the published text. Seeing what it costs in dollars and cents makes plenty of sense— but what about the 19-year-old searching the web on a slow mobile phone connection from Mumbai, or the soccer mom in Germany who loves Rocco Siffredi?

Having your sites properly geotargeted to fit their needs can rapidly improve your conversions of new traffic and retention of existing members. This is hardly a new concept, as Adweek and others have been reporting about it since early 2016. So, why are some adult site merchants still failing to geotarget their sites properly?

What you’ll find is that the rest of the world combined spends a tremendous amount more online than the U.S. spends in its totality, but the rest of the world prefers to do it in their own currencies of choice.

Geotargeting is About More Than Text Translation

Yes, your sales pitch and site content will perform better if it is displayed in the native language of each viewer. However, real geotargeting goes deeper than that. What appeals to an Italian national may be quite different than what appeals to a New Yorker of Italian ancestry. Having landing pages matched to each location which are specifically aimed at converting each segment of your audience will outperform a one-size-fits-all approach nearly every time.

Even more importantly, can you tell me off the top of your head, exactly how much your site costs in Polish zloty Now ask yourself if a Polish porn fan preparing to masturbate is aware of what the site will cost him if you only list the price in U.S. dollars? You can avoid having him pull his pants up to search Google conversion rates on international currency, by simply displaying the price for him in the currency he wants to use.

Varied Earning Capacity Dictates Proper Pricing

You could easily change your join page to charge 1 million dollars per month of membership, but you don’t. Why not? Pricing must be set at a figure that people are willing to pay. You may be expecting $9-35 per join, because that has been the going rate in the U.S. for a long time, but if you charge $35 per month to someone living in Colombia, you may as well be asking for one million dollars.

According to Reuters, minimum wage in Colombia is now equivalent to $246.00 per month. That means a large percentage of the population in Colombia is earning $250 or less every month. If you try to charge them $35.00 US for a porn site membership, you are asking them to spend roughly 14 percent of their entire income on your latest updates. Would you spend 14 percent of your income to join one porn site for one month?

Properly scripted join pages can immediately display specific pricing targeted to each potential customer. That means you can charge $34 in Los Angeles and $4 in Colombia simultaneously. Why would you want to sell your site joins for just four dollars to anyone? Because it’s four dollars more than you are earning now, and they won’t pay more than that no matter how great your site is based on their earning capacity.

Is There Any Actual Money to be Made In Other Countries?

Adding another half-dozen $4 sales to your bottom line each month probably wouldn’t be worth chasing after, but the fact is, your international revenue can be worth even more than your U.S. sales generate.

As of the early part of 2017, China was $672 billion of all online sales and showed 35 percent annual growth. The U.S. was only 340 billion of all online sales for comparison purposes. The U.K. accounted for $99 billion of its own, Japan came in at $79 billion, Germany at $73 billion, France at $43 billion and all the way on down the line. You can see the figures for yourself in an article from Business.com.

Instead of comparing the U.S. to any one other country, try comparing it to the sum total of all other countries. What you’ll find is that the rest of the world combined spends a tremendous amount more online than the U.S. spends in its totality, but the rest of the world prefers to do it in their own currencies of choice.

What Will You Do With All That Lira, Zloty and Yen You Collect?

Relax, we at MobiusPay aren’t going to mail you a wadded-up brick of crumpled Indian rupees. We do all the currency exchange for you behind the scenes. The moment a customer makes a payment, that money in whatever currency they chose is quickly converted to U.S. dollars on your behalf and added to your regular payout from American transactions. You get one simple payment by your preferred payout method, it just happens to be a lot larger because you are finally able to monetize the rest of the world properly.

Setting up multi-currency join pages is a simple task, and our staff can also assist you with other aspects of your conversion from a strictly American web portal to one the rest of the world may also want to join. It's something every large volume merchant has been doing online for years already. The best time to update your own join page sales funnel happens to be right now.

Instead of allocating all of your time to figuring out where to acquire more traffic, spending even more money creating original content, discovering the hottest new models, editing fresh updates, interacting with your member community, setting up cross sales and seeking better SEO placements – why not allocate a few hours to monetizing the enormous part of the world you are ignoring so that your existing traffic, content and effort can earn you more money than it already does? Optimizing your site should include optimizing it for each potential customer.

As an online business, you aren’t a local store, but you do want to feel like one to each customer who reaches your join page. There is a reason many of the most valuable brick and mortar retailers hire greeters to stand at their door welcoming you into their stores. Your join page should serve the same purpose, but instead of saying “welcome” to each person who walks through the door, it needs to be able to say it in their own local language, and your cash register better be able to accept pesos, shekels or any other form of currency as easily as it accepts dollars, if you truly want to remain competitive in the global online marketplace.

Jonathan Corona has 15 years of experience in the electronic payments industry. As MobiusPay’s EVP, Corona is primarily responsible for day-to-day operations as well as reviewing and advising merchants on a multitude of compliance standards set forth by the card associations. MobiusPay specializes in merchant accounts in the U.S., E.U. and Asia. Follow them @MobiusPay on Twitter, FB and IG.

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