Global growth in the digital age: The case for Continuous Localisation

The way we do business today moves fast—faster than ever, in fact, with global e-commerce projected to grow by 9.5% annually between now and 2029.

Global eCommerce growth worldwide (Source: Statista https://www.statista.com/outlook/emo/ecommerce/worldwide#revenue)

And the truth is that for many businesses, traditional localisation methods just can’t keep up.

As more and more companies try to reach audiences worldwide, it’s clear that we need a better, faster solution.

Enter the era of Continuous Localisation, a groundbreaking shift in how businesses manage localisation workflows. Already adopted by some of the world’s leading global brands, this approach is now becoming accessible to companies of all sizes, setting a new standard for the industry.

Instead of treating localisation as an afterthought, continuous localisation builds it into your workflow. That means you can deliver multilingual content on the fly at the same time. No more releasing EN as a phase 1, with ROW to follow, or testing and learning only in one language and waiting to localise the winning copy… With a continuous localisation approach, you drastically shorten the delivery cycle, meaning faster launches, smoother customer experiences, and the kind of loyalty that drives real revenue growth.

In this article, we’ll look at how the needs of international companies have changed, where traditional translation processes are falling short, and how and where it makes sense to adopt a continuous localisation approach.

So let’s get stuck in!

For ambitious, fast-growing businesses, expanding into new markets isn’t just a milestone—it’s an essential part of long-term growth.

Yet, many organisations approach localisation as an afterthought, treating it as the final step in a go-to-market process that concludes once a product or campaign is live.

Traditional localisation workflows rely on a linear process: content is finalised in one language, sent for translation, and then reintegrated into platforms. While this approach may seem straightforward, it often leads to significant inefficiencies:

1. Delays to market. When localisation is treated as the final step in a project, international launches are always second to your core market. As teams wait for translations to be completed, valuable time is lost—time that could have been spent capturing market share and generating revenue.
2. Lost customers. While waiting for your non-EN text to come back or for the result of an EN-only A/B test to be run, analysed and acted on, you might miss out on sales. Research shows that 40% of people will not buy a product or service unless offered to them in their language (CSA Research).
3. Poor customer retention. Aside from actual point-of-sale content, key touchpoints, from FAQs to product documentation and customer service, often get overlooked and are not localised at all. Just by having customer care in their own language, 75% of shoppers say they’re more likely to buy from the same brand again (CSA Research).
4. Costly bottlenecks. With every new product update or campaign, traditional localisation processes require retranslation, manual coordination, and reimplementation. These repetitive cycles increase costs, consume resources, and create operational bottlenecks that can slow down progress.

But what if we told you all these drawbacks are avoidable? Rather than thinking of translation as an offline step in your GTM process, it became embedded into the very fabric of how you do business —working in sync with your teams and processes, not after the fact.

That’s where continuous localisation comes in.

By making localisation an integral and ongoing part of your workflow, you can keep pace with your growth ambitions and deliver exceptional, consistent experiences for every market you serve.

As we’re beginning to see, continuous localisation is more than just a process; it’s a philosophy. Rather than localising content as an afterthought, this approach integrates localisation at every stage of the content lifecycle.

Continuous localisation is like having a system that never stops translating and adapting your content for different languages and cultures. Instead of waiting to finish a project before translating it, the process happens in real time or on a rolling basis. Every update you make to your content—whether it’s a new page on your site, product description, or a form that a supplier needs to read and sign—gets localised right away.

Continuous localisation is about speed, but it’s also about making the localisation process easier to manage internally. It’s flexible by design, allowing you to choose workflows that align with your business needs and priorities.

For example, depending on your goals, you can select from these options:

• Option A: Machine translation with automated post-editing as the final version. This is perfect for speed and efficiency when AI-only output meets your needs.
• Option B: Machine translation with automated post-editing to offer better quality than standard live placeholder text. Human post-editing takes place in the following days for additional quality assurance. Perfect for more sensitive projects or markets.
• Option C: Machine translation with human post-editing as the primary approach. While this takes a bit longer, it ensures high-quality translations are ready to go live the first time, making it easier to manage overall.

Each workflow can be tailored to match your project priorities, whether that’s achieving rapid turnaround times or ensuring the highest quality for key markets.

At its core, continuous localisation is about flexibility, making the process seamless while enabling you to deliver great content consistently across languages and markets.

Let’s look at how continuous localisation could work in practice by outlining the steps to bring some content to another market. For the purpose of the exercise, let’s imagine you’re a fashion retailer and want to create content for a new landing page.

1. Content creation: The localisation process begins as teams produce the new content—let’s say a page title and three sections of text that talk about a seasonal sale.
2. Integration with tools: Your localisation provider syncs directly with your content management systems, initiating machine translations immediately based on your uploaded English content.
3. Initial translation: AI-based machine-generated translations provide both a starting point for non-English content and act as placeholder text, meaning you can go live with your page in all your POS at the same time. When you partner with us, you get extra peace of mind knowing that our AI-based machine translation has been built using deep linguistic expertise. Plus, it comes with the bonus of an automated post-editing step*, customisable to your brand style guide and tone of voice.
4. Linguist review: Let’s imagine you want the German page to be adapted to mention the ski season, or maybe it’s a key target market, and you want to make the best impression. That’s where the professionals come in! Expert linguists (from your localisation agency) refine the machine translations, ensuring cultural relevance, accuracy, and tone consistency.
5. Real-time updates: Thanks to the plug-in with your CMS, the updated German copy goes live seamlessly, with no back-and-forth cutting and pasting strings from one file into a CMS tool.

And that’s it – super efficient, simultaneous localisation for any platform. Because it’s all based on plugins, continuous localisation can happen for your email system, sales CRM system, website CMS, and internal HR system… Anywhere you need non-English content.

This workflow enables businesses to iterate and improve quality continually, even post-launch, allowing them to respond dynamically to market feedback.

*Continuous localisation doesn’t need to end with your external content. What about your day-to-day internal translation need? Our self service AI translation tool Pronto offers automated translations with a built-in, brand-specific augmented post-editing phase, so you can feel more confident about the quality of translations you’re producing for internal purposes.

Continuous localisation is a game-changer for:

1. E-Commerce: Launch multilingual product pages globally on the same day, improving discoverability and increasing conversions.
2. Multi-channel businesses: Align campaigns across regions by ensuring all touchpoints—website, app, email, social, customer service, internal comms—are localised in real-time.
3. Content-driven businesses: Deliver articles, guides, marketing content or educational resources in multiple languages, fostering engagement and brand loyalty.
4. Optimisation-focused businesses: For a large company, even a tiny improvement in a checkout process can mean big bucks. Rather than testing in EN and waiting for the results to be translated, with a continuous localisation process, you can deploy the winning messaging in near real-time, getting you the benefits much quicker.
5. Multi-site businesses: Equip staff with localised manuals, training, onboarding experiences, promotions and communications for seamless employee experiences.
6. Time-sensitive businesses: Retail, travel, news and media brands need multilingual content fast and often even in real-time. Continuous localisation makes this possible.
7. SaaS companies: Any business with frequent product updates, launching new features or adjusting UX/UI would benefit from immediate localisation to keep experiences consistent across markets and reduce development time.

Traditionally, translation has been (unfairly, we would argue) viewed as a cost centre, a time-consuming, laborious overhead that’s the price of doing business internationally.

But there’s more and more data to support localisation being seen as an investment in your company’s growth.

In a nutshell, investing in ROW growth looks far more profitable as a growth strategy than an EN-only model.

This revenue model illustrates how non-EN investment produces a better ROI (Source: CSA Research https://csa-research.com/Blogs-Events/Blog/Dont-Lose-Big-Money-by-Saving-Pennies-on-Localization)

So what’s the reason for this? How does localisation drive operational profitability?

If we take it back to basics, better localisation means a better overall experience, which in turn means more customers and, ultimately, more loyalty.

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail:

1. Quality: Going beyond words

Continuous localisation isn’t just about speed or efficiency—it’s about delivering content that genuinely works for your business. Does it resonate with your audience? Does it trigger an emotional response? Does it drive the desired action, whether making a purchase, signing up for a service, or understanding a concept? 

Even when AI-powered tools are part of the process, human expertise is at the heart of delivering this level of quality. Expert linguists refine algorithms, craft effective prompts, and QA-check outputs to ensure your content maintains its integrity across languages and markets. This combination of technology and human skill allows you to deliver localised experiences that inspire trust, engagement, and loyalty, helping you meet your business goals on a global scale.

2. Staying fresh: Iterative updates
Continuous localisation allows businesses to refine content on the fly, ensuring the highest standards. 

Picking the right LSP here is vital, as the quality of the output depends on the quality, experience and expertise of the linguists. As we just touched on, many people miss that even when using an AI-based solution, linguists will have been a part of the development process, inputting into algorithms and QA processes. Choosing a partner who can shine in this area will mean a better quality result regarding the fluency and impact of your content.

3. Customer experience: A new normal
English has dominated global content for too long, leaving many audiences underserved. Estimates show a huge disparity between the amount of the internet that’s written in English (roughly 52%) and how many English speakers there actually are in the world. The result is that four in five people can’t understand over half of the internet. 

By moving to continuous localisation as standard BAU practice, businesses democratise access to information, showing that every customer matters.

4. Loyalty: The long-term impact
Localised content fosters trust and satisfaction and even makes customers more forgiving; studies show that 62% of customers are willing to overlook a problem with a product or service if support is offered in their own language.

When customers feel understood, they’re likely to be more engaged, easier to retain, more likely to shop from you again and more likely to recommend you to their friends.

There’s an argument here, too, for early adoption. By getting ahead of the game and leading the charge in your sector for faster, better localisation, you could gain a precious competitor advantage over your rivals, held back by slow or costly translation processes.

As we’ve been discussing, continuous localisation is a methodology, more of a how than a what. 

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be measured for its impact. Here are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that a business can expect to see positive results from when they move to a continuous localisation approach: 

Customer acquisition
More and faster-localised content makes it easier to attract customers in international markets. 

International sales revenue
Launching fully localised content globally on day one enables businesses to capture international demand immediately. Another way to measure this would be to track your share of revenue from global markets; a move to continuous localisation would increase this metric.

Cost of acquisition (CAC)
With streamlined workflows and AI-powered translation tools, continuous localisation reduces the cost of adapting campaigns for multiple languages. This efficiency lowers overall marketing spend, thereby reducing CAC.

Organic referrals
Connected to the above point, a fully localised business could expect discoverability to increase since translated site content will boost search engine algorithms. More localised content means more organic traffic (and probably better leads).

Conversion rate
Localised websites and apps lead to higher conversion rates. Customers are more likely to start and complete purchases when they understand the process. Continuous localisation ensures these elements are always up-to-date and culturally relevant, maximising the likelihood of conversion.

Lifetime value (LTV)
Customers who feel understood and valued are more likely to remain loyal. Continuous localisation ensures content aligns with local cultural and linguistic nuances, fostering trust and encouraging repeat purchases. Over time, this increases the lifetime value of international customers.

Retention rate
As we’ve seen, localised customer support boosts international customers’ propensity to buy from a brand again. For companies with high CACs, this metric becomes especially important.

In today’s hyperconnected world, international customers deserve more than just an afterthought—they deserve an experience as seamless, personal, and impactful as any English-speaking audience. Thinking about one market ahead of another feels outdated in a world where this technology is available and so easy to use.

Plus, continuous localisation isn’t just a tool; it’s a mindset shift. It’s about prioritising global customers by offering them a personalised, optimised experience that fosters trust and deepens engagement. Who doesn’t want that?

In fact, you can almost think of continuous localisation as an extension of your “put the customer first” strategy—on a global scale.

Just as customer-centricity means understanding and addressing the unique needs of each individual, continuous localisation ensures that every customer, regardless of their language or location, feels valued and understood. It’s about meeting people where they are, in their language, and in the context that resonates with them most.

Integrating continuous localisation into your workflow sends a clear message: every customer matters. This isn’t just about translation; it’s about creating experiences that feel familiar, effortless, and tailored—because that’s what being customer-first truly means. It’s applying the principles of empathy and personalisation universally, making every interaction meaningful, regardless of borders or barriers.

When it comes to any sort of tech investment, the choice of a partner matters. For us, the difference is in the quality of the input; we bring unparalleled language expertise to the table, working with the best linguists from around the world. We pay above market rates because we only want to work with the creme de la creme. With decades of experience across industries and markets, we understand the nuances of language, culture, and context—ensuring your message lands precisely as intended, everywhere.

But it’s not just our language prowess that sets us apart; it’s the way we work with you. “Yes” is our favourite word. We’re problem-solvers who thrive on making the complex simple; from last-minute requests to large-scale global campaigns, we’re here to support you every step of the way.

Whether you’re a global enterprise, a fast-growing medium-sized business, or a startup with big ambitions, you can count on us to deliver. As a trusted technology partner, we’ve built robust workflows and innovative solutions that allow us to handle localisation at any scale.

So, why choose Comtec? Because we don’t just help you translate content; we help you transform your global presence. With our expertise, customer-first ethos, and dependable delivery, we’re the localisation partner you can trust to grow your business internationally.

If you’d like to chat more about whether or not continuous localisation is the right approach for your organisation or request a demo of any of our services, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!