Effective and Innovative Ways to Attract Millennials to Your Ecommerce Store
This is a guest post written by Raul Harman.
The tech-savvy millennial generation is taking up the majority of consumer force around the globe. Companies, especially ecommerce businesses, must now rethink their approach to attract this generation to their stores. As you may already know, millennials aren’t easy to work with.
The main reason is that they grew up around the technology and they have specific preferences because of it. Moreover, they grew up during two major recessions in the world, and they are living through a third one now, so they are careful about spending and won’t go on a shopping spree anytime soon. It seems next to impossible to cater to the needs of this generation.
However, just because it seems impossible to manage millennials, it doesn’t mean that it is. You just have to be creative and innovative enough to get their attention. With that in mind, here are a few effective and innovative ways to attract millennials to your ecommerce store.
Be mobile-friendly
If there’s something millennials prefer, it’s to browse the web using their smartphones. Yes, they seem glued to their phones, and nothing can divert their attention from it.
This is your way into their world. The best way to attract millennials is to fully optimize your ecommerce store for mobile. If it isn’t mobile-friendly, millennials won’t bother with it. Here are a few things you can do:
- Opt for mobile-first indexing – In terms of SEO, mobile-first indexing will boost the visibility of your store for mobile search.
- Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – This is a way to create fully optimized mobile pages of your store that load quickly and have seamless navigation and design.
- Use responsive design – This design can adapt to any screen size and any device.
- Reduce heavy content – Heavy content may help you in more ways than one, but it’s difficult to view on a mobile device.
- Improve loading speed – Millennials aren’t known to be a patient sort. Even a second delay in page loading times can reduce conversions by 7%.
Improve the checkout process
Like many other consumers, millennials prefer a seamless checkout process. They don’t want any obstacles, delays or inconveniences standing between them and their purchase. Therefore, the entire shopping experience and the check out process are additional things that should be optimized for mobile.
Furthermore, if you want to be innovative, you should redesign the payment processing as well. We live in a world where effective Bitcoin mining is a genuine trend, especially among millennials. They love the idea of digital currencies, and they prefer to use it. So, try implementing cryptocurrencies as payment methods at your ecommerce store.
This will certainly get their attention and even encourage them to buy from you. Simply put, an intuitive checkout process and shopping experienced optimized for mobile with cryptos as payment methods is the way to get millennials to your store.
Enhance your messaging
An interesting fact about millennials is that they like to communicate with businesses and brands. If you want their attention, you’ll have to reach out to them.
If you’re developing a brand for your ecommerce store, make sure you use the right tone when engaging millennials. That said, try to be more informative than trying to sell them stuff. More importantly, ask them for feedback.
Millennials prefer when businesses do this, especially when business create user-generated content based on the feedback they received. Therefore, craft your messages so that you can really get the attention of the millennial generation. Here are a few things you can do:
- Start a blog – Millennials like to interact with businesses through blogs.
- Be active on social media – Millennials dwell on social media most of the time, and these platforms are the best means of communicating with them.
- Personalize your email newsletters – Personalization is highly regarded by millennials.
- Post relevant content – Original content is king and millennials like various formats, such as videos and podcasts.
Offer something free
Everyone likes free incentives, not just millennials. When it comes to the millennial generation, offering them something for free can mean the difference between gaining their attention and them ignoring your business altogether.
Something free doesn’t have to be anything major. You can offer them a free eBook, a premium video, a coupon or a discount. Even such small gestures can go a long way in developing a meaningful relationship with your millennial audience.
If you want to go the extra mile to gain their attention and encourage them to convert, you can also offer them free shipping. Unlike their predecessors, millennials prefer to look for a reason to engage with a business. Sometimes that’s powerful brand messaging, while sometimes it’s free stuff.
Millennials are not a simple consumer group to please. Their shopping behavior greatly differs from the behavior of older generations. That’s why ecommerce stores have such difficult times attracting millennial attention. For what it’s worth, you just have to think of a slightly different approach because millennials aren’t so hard to get as it would seem.
Author Bio:
My name is Raul and I am editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. Please take a minute to connect with me on Twitter and Facebook.