How To Make Millennials Fall In Love With Your Shopify Store And Get More Sales

This is a guest contribution from Vanhishikha Bhargava, the Content Coordinator at Plobal Apps which is a Mobile App building platform for Shopify stores.

Posted 6 years ago by Tamal Santra

Born between 1980 and 2000, millennials are the largest living generation as of today. The group, comprising of 77 million people, is the first to grow up in the age of internet and it is their use of technology that makes millennials so unique. (Nielsen)

If you compare smartphone users by age, mobile penetration is the highest among millennials. In fact, a quarter of them look at their phones 100+ times a day and spend more than five hours on the device on a daily basis. (B2X.com)

Naturally, millennials are more receptive towards shopping online. They love browsing through eCommerce stores and checking product reviews. Since they are much more cautious about spending money than previous generations, they are always hunting for good deals and that makes them look for different online stores!

Millennials and eCommerce go hand-in-hand

This internet-dependent group is a hot target of Shopify stores. As the global e-retail sales are expected to touch $1 trillion in 2021, the competition among eCommerce brands is higher than ever. Shopify alone caters to more than 500,000 businesses across 175 countries.

To be honest, there is no dearth of online stores for millennials to shop from. With most Shopify stores implementing aggressive marketing strategies around referrals, discounts, CX and more, the competition only gets tougher for an online store brand to stick.

What makes it worse, is the short attention span of consumers and their expectation from an online store.

You make one wrong move or are not able to offer what they expect from you, they immediately move to another online store. Customer retention is increasingly becoming a challenge for Shopify stores.

Now you can’t possibly be lowering your product prices all the time to grab their attention. But what you can do, is make them fall in love with your brand. Build loyalty instead of pushing for sales!

Making customers fall in love with your Shopify store

1) Personalize your communication

Most companies tend to forget that they are dealing with “creatures of emotion, not creatures of logic”. To scale your Shopify store, run tailor-made discounts. Every consumer, irrespective of the age group, loves to feel special and will never say no to exclusive offers.

Upselling and cross-selling is a tried-and-tested strategy in eCommerce to make more sales. Track the consumer’s browsing and purchase history and recommend relevant products whenever he lands on your online store. Create a need within him to buy an ABC product from you.

Alternatively, hook the visitor with time-bound promotional offers such as a free gift card.

2) Conduct referral schemes

Such programs are one of the most effective tactics to engage the existing customer base and to connect with prospective customers. People in general like to share value with everyone around them. If you give incentives to your customers for referring you to their friends or family, you will increase your chances of making more sales.

Online customers are 4X more likely to buy from a brand that has been referred by a friend. Uber has an effective referral program that helps the online cab service earn loyalty. A core growth strategy that Uber follows is getting their customers to refer the mobile app to friends and family.

More the number of Uber app downloads, more credits for the existing customer. Genius, isn’t it?

3) Create a mobile app to shop on-the-go

Mobile use has redefined consumer behaviour and revolutionized eCommerce growth in a big way. And if we only speak of millennials, smartphone is a necessity for them, not a luxury. Therefore, if your mobile experience is not up to the mark, millennials won’t fall in love with your brand.

Having a mobile app will not only offer a friendlier shopping experience but ensure better response rates. Your Shopify app will become another source of revenue. The good part is 80% of online transactions on top 100 US retailers are via mobile. [Adobe Insights]

This clearly shows that the platform has huge potential. However, for a Shopify store that is functioning on optimized resources, a big challenge is to device a Shopify app. If you take the conventional route and get your app designed by a developer, it will further dip your resources.

Fortunately, with platforms like Plobal Apps, it is easy to make a Shopify app on both Android and iOS platforms. Without any coding expertise, you can set your native mobile app in minutes.

4) Improve customer experience (CX)

A 2009 study from Peppers & Rogers Group states 81% of companies providing customer experiences perform higher than their competitors. This holds true even today. Customer experience is considered the new battlefield for companies across industry to drive revenues, and eCommerce is no exception.

Millennials are tech-savvy and use an average of six touchpoints before making an purchase decision. They like to have the flexibility to pick up a conversation with a brand on multiple platforms. The sad news is only 39% of businesses can are able to do and that is incredibly frustrating.

If you want to nurture a millennial, make sure you have the right CX strategy in place. Chatbots and live chat tools are being extensively used by online stores. You can start with that and engage visitors while they are browsing through, help them finalize a purchase when they can’t decide what they want to buy or resolve their after-sales complaints.

Always remember – acquiring a customer costs more whereas even a 5% rise in customer retention can lead to growth in profits by up to 95%. [Harvard Business Review]

5) Treat your customers to loyalty programs

Every year, bad customer experiences cost US businesses around $41 billion. Don’t be one of those eCommerce stores that falls apart only because it couldn’t treat its customers like royalty. Looking for examples? Starbucks could offer inspiration.

“My Starbucks Program” from the coffee retail chain is an ideal example on how customers could be treated like royalty. The reward system enables the customer to earn a star on every purchase which later leads to free cupcakes on birthdays or getting a Gold Card.

Alternatively, if a customer puts up your product’s photo on social media or posts positively about your services, make sure you incentivize that activity. Give him a voucher or a freebie that will nudge him to buy more from you. It is a smart tactic to retain, royally.

Endnotes

Customer care expert Damon Richards once said, “Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”.

Therefore, win the millennial customer’s loyalty by going the extra mile to know them and to understand their needs. Once you start making a relationship with them, you’ll see them stay longer!