Rebecca
As an Ecommerce business leader, you’re always looking for new ways to build up your customer base. One of the greatest things about running a business that’s all online is that you can build up your customer base anywhere, whether that’s baby boomers in Nevada or college students in the UK. And recently, you’ve been thinking that you’d like to attract Gen Zers to your brand. They’re young, they’re going to be a large part of the American consumers soon, and you want to do what you can to have them shopping at your Ecommerce store before they shop with your competitors.
Even though Gen Zers are a mystery and even more mysterious to understand as consumers than the millennial generation that came before them, there are some great strategies you can use for attracting them to your brand. Here’s how.
1 Make your site mobile-friendly
According to a recent report by the tech company Live Person, “65 percent of millennials and Generation Z interact with each other digitally more than they do in the real world. 70.1 percent of the people surveyed said they sleep with their phone within arm’s reach, 64.5 percent said they take their phone to the bathroom with them, and 52.2 percent said they check their phone if they wake up briefly during the night.”
As you can imagine, this happens even more often with Gen Zers than with millennials. After all, they’ve grown up with phones around them, and tablets and an Internet connection that means they’ve rarely ever had to wait for a Netflix move to load. So if your Ecommerce site doesn’t show up properly on a phone, they won’t have the patience to wait for your images or content to show up right. It doesn’t matter how clever your business name is; you need to design your site with mobiles in mind, or you won’t attract this audience.
To learn more about optimizing your site for mobile, check out these tips from Smashing Magazine.
2 Get on social media–especially Snapchat
An effect of Gen Zers spending so much time on their phones is, of course, that they spend a lot of time on social media. They’ve grown up using Facebook and Instagram, and they’ve mastered Snapchat better than any other generation. So if you want to connect with them in a way that’s meaningful to them, you need to get on social media. Whether your business is selling vintage purses or modern tech, studying up on your social media strategy will get you far with Gen Zers.
Snapchat is especially important. It’s not the most intuitive for businesses to use, but it’s important. According to MediaPost, “One in five (21 percent) Gen Zers finds Snapchat influential in their purchase decisions, twice as many as Millennials, our research has found. In addition, this young demographic favors Snapchat and Instagram more than all other generations by large margins…On average, we found, Gen Z bounces among five different social channels a day, but is active on Snapchat a whopping 11 times a day.”
Snapchat is a bit tricky to use but worth it. To learn more about how to use Snapchat for your business, take a look at these strategies from QuickSprout.
3 Obsess about customer service
There’s a reason why Generation Z is called the “always on, on demand” generation. It’s because they expect everything to be available to them at all times, and they want to be taken seriously, too. Just because they’re young, they don’t see that as a reason for you to act like they aren’t as important as your older, most loyal customers. In part this is because they have a general distrust of businesses–and that’s exactly why you need to be great at customer service.
According to Spredfast, “Sixty percent of Gen Z folks are more likely than average consumers to hang up if their call isn’t answered in under 45 seconds…Customer care, in general, is incredibly important, especially on social. Increasingly, social is used by consumers to address customer service issues, and the importance of individualized, timely care will only become more important as Gen Z grows into their buying power.”
This translates to you not only being awesome at customer service but also using technology like bots to be available 24/7.
These are some of the most important strategies for attracting Gen Z customers to your ecommerce store. What other strategies do you use to attract customers to your ecommerce store? Which are most effective?
