Overview:
About Applied Plastics – An Innovative Manufacturing Company
Applied Plastics offers Engineered Coating Solutions. Its proprietary PTFE Natural® coating is applied to a variety of metals – stainless steel, nitinol, silver-plated copper – and used in numerous applications like mandrels, pull wires, core wires, hypotubes, stylets, and guidewires. They are committed to providing customers with superior products that enable the manufacturing of innovative life-saving devices.
Problem:
Cost-Conscious Expansion of Global Online Sales
As part of a large-scale rebranding effort, Norwood, MA-based Applied Plastics saw an opportunity for global online sales growth, particularly in Asia, Europe, and Costa Rica. The Company needed a language services expert to work directly with their web designer to identify initial target languages and translate complex manufacturing and product information, all on a limited budget. Throughout, every aspect of the rebranding effort constituted an essential part in enhancing the customer experience.
Solution:
Create an Individualized Customer Experience for the Global Customer
Applied Plastics’ web designer selected German, Spanish and Simplified Chinese as the target languages with the broadest reach. Rapport International then matched three native-speaking, qualified translators with manufacturing industry experience to the project. The team outlined key pages and strings to translate, eliminating extraneous information to both stay within budget and optimize the customer experience. Product description and pricing pages were selected based on familiarity and profitability and retained the simple ordering process. To safeguard quality, all translated content was next examined by in-country reviewers, and all resulting changes were reviewed and discussed with the agency, resolved, and finalized by the Rapport International team.
Results:
Mitigated Cost of Acquiring International Customers
Applied Plastics’ simple first steps onto the global stage are consistent with its cost-conscious, deliberate approach to expansion, and to an enhanced customer experience. Now armed with a broader reach into an already-profitable market, the company stands to mitigate the cost of acquiring new international customers by repeating this simplified process in new target languages, as further markets emerge. In addition, web analytics will inform them – first-hand and in real-time – of its international customers’ buying patterns and preferences, laying the foundation for a more robust global presence.