The Millennial market consists of about $200 billion of spending power. That is a huge proportion and contains a lot of potential income. In order to snag this market, you have to be able to cater to their shopping preferences.
These are the three main preferences of Millennial customers so you know how to hit them with your eCommerce stores and marketing campaigns.
1. Breaking All the Rules
A fashion boutique may have gone out of their way to target women because they believe that women shop for clothes the most. Nevertheless, this was proven wrong when the statistics came out to demonstrate that men now shop more than women do. This is just one example of all the rules being broken when it comes to Millennials. Simply: the old rules of advertising and building a store have gone out of the window.
For example, gender fluidity is now a thing. Jaden Smith recently fronted the SS16 campaign for Louis Vuitton’s women’s section. A few years ago, a man fronting a campaign for women would be considered unthinkable. Yet, now it’s successful.
What this means for you is that you have to think outside the box. All the lessons you learned about marketing and advertising are entirely irrelevant when it comes to this market.
2. They Don’t Want Advertisements
A startling statistic is that only 1 percent of Millennials said they would trust a brand more when presented with an effective advertisement. We only need to look at the rise of things like AdBlocker and the demise of old-fashioned types of Internet ads, such as banner ads, to see this trend in action.
Instead, what they want is an interactive platform that embraces the spirit of the adventure. As more and more brands begin to understand what these young shoppers want, they are unveiling personalized shopping platforms. So what does this mean for you?
Stop wasting your money on more traditional forms of advertising. You are spending your money on something that’s no longer effective. Instead, focus on the individual user experience. Millennials are not part of a community they are individuals, and your shopping proposition should acknowledge that.
One way to do this is to gather data on customer accounts and create recommendations based on what they have looked at before. Google has already done this, and it’s made their search engine more intuitive and user-friendly.
3. Social Experience and Technology
Everyone should know by now that the social side of things is the norm. Millennials express their feelings in the social media environment. To do this, they need technology to work. You are committing a huge error if your technology simply doesn’t work. Millennials expect it – to no questions asked – and they definitely won’t have any sympathy if it doesn’t.
Make sure you test your eCommerce platform repeatedly. Test it with real people to work out the bugs. Even when it’s released, keep your developer on standby to immediately remedy any problems that appear. Once you know for sure that your technology works, you have to think about how you are integrating your shopping with social media.
To start with, everyone who visits a product page should be able to post a comment of some kind about it. They should also have a button that shares the entire product to whatever social media network the Millennial in question operates on.
The vast majority of your marketing will now take place on social media. Eliminate the banner ads, lightboxes, and anything else invasive. For a start, most Millennials are clever so they likely already have these things blocked. Secondly, they don’t want to see them.
Part of your social experience also includes your values. Millennials want to feel as if they are part of a higher cause. Swap illustrated the importance of this, “By making it clear to our customers what our primary goals and principles were, we increased our sales among millennials by 28 percent.”
4. Monitoring Your Results
A big part of creating your strategy is to know how to interpret statistics. For Millennials, again, this is entirely different. Studies have shown that Millennials spend a lot of time browsing for things they have no intention of buying.
Forget using traffic numbers as your indicator of success. Millennials have less money because they are chronically underemployed. Making the big step from browsing to purchasing is an enormous task you have to master.
Don’t assume your strategy is working simply because your target audience is browsing through your store. That’s not an indicator that your shopping experience is good.