5 Key Millennial Consumer Behaviors Retailers can’t Ignore for an Effective Web Strategy
The tech savvy, bargain buying and fugitive millennials are often a trending topic amongst retailers. Thus, they keep constant track of millennial consumer behaviors. According to Forbes– “There are eighty million millennials in America alone and they represent about a fourth of the entire population, with $200 billion in annual buying power”. This makes retailer think twice while strategizing their e-commerce website development or enhancement plan. The impact of ever changing millennial consumer behavior gives rise to a great debate on the suitable design for an ecommerce website, that is whether Responsive Web Design(RWD) works better or the Adaptive Web Design(AWD) for retailers. While majority of the retailers would like to move forward with the RWD as it is more SEO friendly and follows the basic mantra of “one design fits all”, on other hand, AWD helps the retailers to focus on constructing multiple templates for various form factors.
Coming to the design elements of an e-commerce website, the ultimate objective of a retailer is to provide the consumers an ultimate user experience. This is where AWD have slight edge over RWD. RWD takes time in detecting the web browser on the client side and then loads the template accordingly, whereas the AWD detects the form factor from the server side and loads the respective template, enabling faster page loads, leading customers to the moment of truth.
Coming of the age, millennials has grown up in the era of technological change, economic disruption and globalization. These factors have affected their behavior a lot.
Some of the millennial consumer behaviors to consider before setting up a strategy to build an ecommerce website are:
Digital Natives
The millennials in the true essence are the first digital natives, which means they are active on multiple social media platform, truly understand the power of networking and this allows them to connect with the people beyond their reach. Millennials expect the digital interfaces to be simple and direct. Also, millennials have the tendency to jump to the conclusion quickly and criticize about interfaces and retailers when interfaces/websites fail to live up to their expectations. One negative encounter and it will spread across the social media like a wildfire, which can spoil the retailer’s image.
Seeks Convenience
The Gen Y or millennials are not big on brand loyalty, if they experience a slight hiccup while browsing an e-commerce website, they tend to switch to some other e-commerce website with better user experience. While doing shopping online, they want to – use social media, chat with friends, chat with brand representatives and do extensive online research simultaneously. Millennials use multiple devices to make purchases, eventually mobile has turned into a hand-held wallet for them. So, it is important for retailers to engage the millennial consumers by providing them a streamlined, user-friendly and highly responsive web interface.
Elevated Expectations for Personalized Experiences
Millennials expect retailers to understand their preferences and make personalized recommendations to serve their needs. They seek for an uniform 1:1 level personalized experience on the various touch-points provided by the retailer. Wherever they choose to engage, they expect the content, offers and promotions to be apt, serving their precise moments of need. In the post-computer era, where most of the website traffic is generated from the mobile, the marketers of retailing are focusing on the customer relationship management, which contains the attributes like customer retention, customer acquisition and most importantly, the ability to provide personalized experience. Considering the millennial consumer behaviors, the web design technique should complement the entire process to fulfill the objectives of a retailer to ensure higher customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Practical and Result Oriented
Millennials are more process and service oriented and are most likely to speed up their interactions. They become furious when they feel that the time has been wasting, they want to learn in quick and efficient manner. An insight into the millennial consumer behaviors enable retailers to construct a simple yet effective e-commerce website consisting of features like good catalogue management, simplified shopping cart for ease of checkout, payment integration for faster and hassle-free payment and product review and recommendation engine. This enables the retailer with the chance to scale up the user experience, which in terms also attracts the new and prospective customers.
Impatience
The millennials are highly impatient, they don’t want to spend much time to skim through the entire website to select a product. So, it is important to showcase the relevant product on the landing page, in order to engage them from the beginning. If they sense or feel there is a lag when they are browsing, they immediately switch the website, causing the retailer to lose their customer base. So it is essential for the retailer to develop their content heavy website with AWD in order to provide a seamless user experience to the customers.
The above mentioned millennial consumer behaviors cumulatively should be taken into consideration by any retailer when they are designing/redesigning or launching an ecommerce website. A single negative customer experience can cost the retailer in losing the majority of their customer base, which in terms will impact their revenue stream, market share.