Gaming Omni-Channel Commerce for Millennials

With the rise of digital commerce and marketplaces, consumers have changed both the way they shop and their shopping expectations. For companies to effectively sell and promote their brand, they must deliver a consistent shopping experience across all shopping channels.

While millennials are a group of roughly 80 million in the United States alone, each year they spend approximately $600 billion (accenture). This is a highly digital consumer with incredible purchasing power. In the following paragraphs, we will highlight each shopping channel and how it should be used to best speak to millennial consumers to address the top goal: speak to the target market and provide them a seamless omni-channel shopping experience.

SOCIAL

The first question that must be addressed is two-fold: How do you guide millennials to your digital commerce site and then how do you keep them there? Our proposed strategy is a marriage between both social media and blog content. By forging partnerships with editors and bloggers that speak to millennials, you can curate lifestyle content that will reach your target consumers. In a study conducted by EliteDaily.com, a millennial focused and millennial loved online publication, found that “millennials look for authenticity when consuming content.” You cannot simply create a blatant advertisement and expect your audience to not see right through it, rather you must carefully curate fascinating, appealing content that tells the story your audience wants to hear, by people they want to hear from.

Two brands that are currently excelling in social commerce realm are Tory Burch and Kate Spade. Both brands have embraced social commerce, and as a company whose main demographic is millennials, this is a channel we simply cannot ignore.

“An estimate 79% of Millennials rely on smartphones to access social media. But that figure is only a portion of the picture. The other half of the picture is how often Millennials rely on smartphones to make online purchases – that figure rounds to 44%” (benchmarkblog).

Nearly half of the target audience is making purchases on smartphones. To give them a better shopping experience, let’s review what Kate Spade and Tory Burch are doing:

In turn, brands have a responsibility to give consumers a world-class shopping experience by minimizing out of stock inventory, maintaining visual consistency (i.e. banners) that match what you are posting on social, and thoroughly QA-ing your site to ensure all functionality is working appropriately. This must be followed up with comprehensive confirmations, tracking information and quick delivery turnaround. If you can master these digital commerce expectations, you can follow up with past purchasers inviting them to submit a review and/or to participate in a ‘Vine Program’ like Amazon’s influencer reviews.

CONCLUSION

Incorporating the strategy of a forward thinking, best-in-class digital commerce company includes excelling in all commerce channels. While each channel may have a different approach, in the end you offer our consumers a best in class, seamless shopping experience and the most compelling customer journey.