While the majority of your content will be found on the pages of your website, if you’re looking to turbocharge your marketing, you’re probably going to use some popups. Popups are still an amazing way to build your email list, capture lost revenue, and get attention. While the average conversion rate for a popup is only about 3%, high-quality notifications can perform at over 11%, so it’s definitely worth using popups to optimize your marketing efforts.

As exciting as these notification bubbles can be, they can also be annoying and should always be used in a way that enhances the user experience. Just like the content on the rest of your website, popups that have relevant, valuable content or offers are more likely to be appreciated by your site visitors. A popup that’s written in human language, that doesn’t detract from the user experience, and that doesn’t ruin the entire website when you’re surfing on mobile can be a useful addition to your marketing stack.

But popups can create a unique problem for people who are running an international business and working with a multilingual website as they have to be translated, just like the rest of the website. A popup bubble translator allows you to have consistent messaging across markets regardless of the language that your viewer is reading in. You can push a valuable and relevant message that’s understandable and makes sense in real-time, and you can use popups that strengthen your brand perception across various languages and audiences.

Why Use Translated Popups?

In some cases, multilingual webpages will translate the page content but simply remove the popup windows for their translated audiences. This loses the benefits of the popup for a wide swath of the readers. With Weglot, it’s easy to translate popups into a target language on a multilingual webpage. Since popups are such a valuable piece of your digital communication, it makes sense to prioritize that popup bubble translation with building out your multilingual marketing strategy.

Popups can be used for a wide range of applications, but they generally function most effectively as a tool for grabbing a user’s attention or encouraging the user to take a quick, low-investment action. Translated popups are the online equivalent of the candy bars at the grocery store checkout: low-cost impulse buys.

Grow Your Email List

One of the most common ways to use popup windows is to grow your email marketing list. Popups can be customized to fit the content on each individual page with an offer or lead magnet tailored to correspond to the content on that page, or they can be larger, more universal list-building popups that are generic ways to collect email information.

Promote Offers

You can use popup translation to promote special offers of seasonal or sale products, or to hype up an upcoming or recent product that you’d like to feature or highlight. These sorts of popups can even be customized by your audience, featuring a different product or message depending on the audience’s language, location, or other recorded features.

Highlight Announcements or Important Information

Sitewide or store-wide announcements need to be shared with everyone, so translating your popup is a way to make sure that everyone who visits your site gets the same critical information. But sometimes, you may have important announcements or information that pertain to a specific region or country, and you can have popups translated to give messages to individual audiences as well.

Exit Intent or Cart Abandonment

Popups can be an ideal way to recapture site visitors that may be about to leave your site or abandon their shopping cart. Some studies suggest that 10-15% of your departing visitors may be “saved” by using an exit-intent popup or popover message, so it’s worth translating your popup into the user’s language to make sure that it resonates with your visitor. 

Popup Translation for Different Needs

If you decide to use popup translation, your first question needs to be whether you want the same popup to be displayed to all users in different languages, or whether you’d like a customized message to be used for different languages. This will largely depend on whether you want your translated popup to be regionally tailored or specified.

If your popup will be advertising a deal, content, offer, or news that’s specific to a single region or area, it makes sense to create a customized one that can be displayed only to people using that specific language. In this case, your popup will be different for each user, depending on the language and country settings specified in their browser and indicated by their ISP.

When you don’t have noticeable differences in your deal, content, offer, or news, there’s nothing wrong with having a single popup that gets translated into multiple languages. This popup can be simply translated so that all your readers receive the same message. So you can write your general popup copy in English, but your users will read it in their native language — Korean, Arabic, Turkish, Vietnamese, Romanian, Czech, Thai, Norwegian, Filipino, Polish, Portuguese. You name it!

Weglot: A robust pop-up translator for multilingual websites

One of the biggest advantages is that Weglot can translate your entire website (including popups) without a lot of additional tech work. In fact, the default translation option for Weglot is to translate the entire website, unless you tell it to exclude certain sections or areas from translation.

In addition, Weglot works well with whatever platform your visitors are using: Android, iOS, Google Chrome or Firefox, just to name a few.

Without a solution like Weglot, you’ll need your website visitors to select your popup text, do a right-click to access the context menu, and copy and paste your text into a translation solution like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator or ImTranslator or into some other TTS (text to speech) translator apps to get what you’re saying in your “foreign” language. Or, you might need them to access their translation extension or add-on via their Chrome or Firebox browser toolbar. As you can tell, nothing of this is going to happen! They’ll just ignore your popup window and your marketing message.

How to do Popup Content Translation with the Weglot Pop-up Translator

If you’ve never used Weglot before, you’ll need to sign up for a trial account with Weglot. Once you’ve entered in the basic information about your webpage, your starting language, and your target language, you can get started!

If You’re Using WordPress

You can install the Weglot Plugin using the WordPress Plugins marketplace. After searching, install and activate the plugin titled, “WordPress Translation Plugin – Weglot Translate”. 

As shown in the screenshot, you’ll need to input your API key into the settings on your WordPress plugin, and this information can be found in the Settings section of your Weglot account. Once that’s entered and saved, your website is automatically translated and so are any popups you have!

If You’re Using Shopify

Install the add-on app into Shopify titled, “Translate Your Store – Weglot”. Once this is added and installed into your Shopify account, you’ll be prompted to log into your Weglot account to connect the two platforms. Properly connected, they’ll be able to work together to translate selected text or your entire Shopify store, including popups.

How Your Website Can Use Translated Popups

Different webpages will use popup translators for different purposes, and you’ll be able to find uses for your popup translation that may be unique to your website or your industry. But depending on your business, there are some common use cases for different website types.

Blogs

When it comes to blogs, popups are frequently used to increase email signups that may later be used for email marketing or promotion. A popup translator can help to make sure that the popup marketing is effective across international borders, and that any lead magnets or resources are made available to readers who may not speak the same language.

Because many blogs will use PDF material as a lead magnet (eBooks, White Papers, Case Studies, etc.), it’s worth noting that you may want to customize your translated popup if you’re directing users to your email signup or offering them a lead magnet. For example, if your primary language is in English, you may want to have a version of your White Paper or the welcome email to your email list that’s in Spanish that can be the link used on the translated popup. That way, when a Spanish-speaking user (who may have been using your entire website in Spanish) downloads your white paper, they’ll receive a Spanish-language White Paper delivered with a Spanish-language welcome email, rather than an English version that they might otherwise receive.

Affiliate Sites

Affiliate sites may use translated popups to gain email signups, but they may also appreciate exit-intent popups. Affiliate sites seem to benefit from cross-promotion popups, where the message includes a link to a related post or piece of content. This type of cross-promotion keeps users on the site longer and can help boost conversion rates.

Ecommerce Sites

Ecommerce sites may benefit from a wide range of translated popups, but email signup and cart abandonment popups are probably the most critical. On an ecommerce site, almost anything can be introduced as a popup, but there’s a risk of overusing these notifications and losing their attention-grabbing “interruption” advantage, so they should be used judiciously to make sure that they continue to get the most attention where it’s needed.

The Easy Way to Translate Popups

Not all popup plugins feature built-in translation, but popups are important to boosting your conversion rates and getting the attention of your site visitors. Translating them into the language of your reader is critical to making sure that your message is understood.

Popups can be used to grow your email list, promote a unique offer, broadcast announcements, or prevent your users from leaving too soon. 

Weglot makes it easy to translate popups, even if you don’t have a lot of technical expertise. Give it a try with a free 10-day trial, and see how easy it is to translate popups on your website today!