By Rob Biederman, HourlyNerd
American Millennials clearly aren’t afraid to pull out their wallets and stimulate the economy. They spend nearly $600 billion each year, and by the year 2020, the generation’s annual spend is expected to reach $1.4 trillion — making up approximately 30% of all retail sales.
There’s widespread, yet inaccurate, belief that Millennials are a purely digital generation in terms of how they communicate, consume media, and purchase products. In reality, 82% of these younger consumers prefer the brick-and-mortar experience.
Regardless of their shopping preferences, the 24-hour digital world of assorted products, personalized shopping experiences, and cheap or free shipping has shaken up the retail climate. Retailers have a significant opportunity to increase sales among Millennials if they’re willing to refresh their approach to ensure these young shoppers feel valued and engaged.
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Making The Millennial Transformation
Your efforts to cater to Millennials require a transformation in three key areas: in-store experience, seamless integration, and loyalty. The changes you make in these areas will go a long way toward making each Millennial customer feel like a unique and important part of your brand.
- Turn Store Visits Into Events:
In our increasingly digital world, Millennials are looking for unique, hands-on, and interactive experiences. This extends far beyond simply allowing customers to touch and try your product; it requires a whole new level of ingenuity.Providing this boutique-like in-store experience is an especially challenging task for mass retailers. Verizon recently set a solid example to follow when it combined hands-on access to technology with better-trained specialists. The company now provides an engaging, informative, and personalized experience each time a customer enters the store.
Bringing this level of excitement to your store will stimulate Millennials, encourage them to make purchases, and lead them to spread positive sentiments regarding your company across social media.
- Provide Seamless Online And In-Store Interactions:
Millennials want to be able to converse and interact with retailers across multiple platforms with little to no disruption. Approximately 72% of them research their options online before heading into a store, and they expect that these various platforms will seamlessly feed off each other and communicate consistent information.When they find something they love online, they want to be able to locate that same exact item in your store at the same exact price. Make sure your promotions are consistent across every platform, and make it easy for shoppers to look up in-store availability. Also be sure to allow for the use of mobile coupons in all of your locations.
As time goes on, technology is becoming more and more interwoven with our daily activities. You need to harness this technological reliance to both empower and retain your customers. If your store can’t deliver a seamless multiplatform experience, you’re surely losing customers to a retailer that can.
- Give Perks To Loyal Customers:
Millennials are quite possibly the most loyal shoppers out there. As many as 78% say they’re more likely to pick a brand with a rewards program than a brand without one. They love coupons, point systems, and elite status.Not sure how to reward customer loyalty? Take a page out of the airline industry’s book of frequent flyer programs. Delta recently instituted an expanded frequent flyer system that allows more customers to achieve elite status than it previously did. The top customers still get the best perks, but allowing more fliers into this elite club adds extra value to their patronage.
The strongest loyalty programs incorporate a degree of customization to show customers that you appreciate them as individuals — not just as one large group of assets. These are the three main things that will make your business more Millennial-friendly. But once you complete this transformation, how do you let everyone know about it?
How To Spread The Word
Now that you’ve instituted a better in-store experience, seamless integration, and a killer loyalty program, social media is the best way to let Millennials know about it. Gone are the days of talking at consumers through TV and radio. Nowadays, marketing is about two-way engagement, and social media is the most efficient way to trigger these interactions.
Millennials seem to have a new hot communication method every week; your company needs to roll with these changes and maintain a relevant voice in this constantly evolving arena. In the past, retailers had 50 years to perfect their pitches due to limited marketing avenues. Today, you need to be fast and flexible in order to keep pace.
The more than 75 million Millennials walking our stores’ aisles don’t want the shopping experience of previous generations. They want something interactive, rewarding, consistent, and shareable — and they will only reward retailers that embody these characteristics.
The face of retail is changing; adapt to the shifting landscape or get left behind.
Rob Biederman is the co-founder and CEO of HourlyNerd, a service that connects businesses to top freelance business talent. For more advice on improving your retail brand, check out this HourlyNerd blog post.