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Most website take a Model T approach to overseas marketing. You can access them in any language you what, as long as it’s English. Eighty five percent of the Web’s pages are in English, but only 45 percent of the Web’s users are native speakers of that language, according to research firm IDC, and the percentage is dropping year by year.

Many non-native speakers can read English, sure but making potential customers speak your language- instead of soliciting them in their’s- is a backward way of doing business. English-only might suffice for routine transactions between established businesses partners (or for American tourist in Paris), but if you really want to sell something to someone, you’d better speak that person’s language.

At Oris Elevator, based in Farmington, Conn. Monthly online sales leads shot up from 130 to more than 1,000 after the company launched local-language versions of its website- with 70 percent of those leads coming from new customers. Even simple gestures help. Travelocity vise president Ned Booth says that whenever his company adds country-specific travel services or information to its site (such as local customer-service phone number), sales in that country typically double. As for Travelocity’s new online operation in Germany, Booth says,” We couldn’t market at all if we didn’t do it in German. We’ve really got to be able to communicate clearly and make the experience comfortable enough that they buy.

Such successes are little surprise, but what inhibits many companies is the price of developing a multilingual presence online. It involves translating webpage’s (which can cost 25 cents per word), maintaining several different sites, (one for each country language) coordinating content and branding between the sites, building business systems that are capable of handling international e-commerce, and so forth. According to IT research company Aberdeen Group, the typical cost of producing a website in another language is $50,000 to $100,000 and large projects can run as much as $2 million per language.