Home » Confused Where Retail’s Heading? Then You Only Need Follow The Millennials!

24 November, 2015

Confused Where Retail’s Heading? Then You Only Need Follow The Millennials!

digital performance management firm Dynatrace has just released some research into Millennials, their mobiles and their shopping habits. Here, the company’s senior marketing director Dave Anderson has extracted the best bits of the report and all for B&T readers…

Millennials have increasingly higher demands from their digital user experiences, and retailers need to adapt faster than ever. This is evidenced in a new global survey we conducted that looked at the Christmas holiday shopping habits of consumers across Australia, the US, UK, France and Germany. You can see the full report results here.

Millennials surveyed, those aged 18 – 34, show us some really great insight into current and future customer expectations. As we all know, Millennials are super connected and their mobile is the centre of their digital lives. They’ve become very accustomed to high quality mobile experiences from large international brands like Google, Apple and eBay, and they’ll benchmark local retailers against them, not traditional competitors. Their expectations are high.

Let’s get stuck into the survey data which was conducted in last month, involving more than 6,000 smartphone and tablet owners.

Mobile shopping will set new records again this year, and smartphone and tablet shopping will be a dominant factor across web, mobile web and mobile applications this year.

Huge increases in the use of smartphones and tablets for holiday shopping this year —up 60 per cent for Millennials and 42 per cent for all age groups surveyed.
Millennials are shifting into overdrive, as 50 per cent globally (54 per cent in Australia) will do more holiday shopping on their mobile devices than in stores.

In-store shopping is now also mobile shopping…

62 per cent of Millennials (61 per cent in Australia) will use their mobile devices in physical stores to compare prices, read product reviews and download coupons.
More than one in every four smartphone/tablet users and nearly four of every 10 Millennials will use their devices to make purchases when they are in stores shopping for gifts.

Poor digital performance comes with a big price tag… substantial revenue losses and damage to your brand

75 per cent of all shoppers, 81 per cent of global Millennials and 75 per cent of Australian Millennials report that if a mobile site or mobile app is buggy, slow or prone to crashes they would abandon it and shop elsewhere.
49 per cent of Millennials and 47 per cent of all shoppers using their smartphones and/or tablets say they would shop elsewhere if a mobile site or app fails to load in three seconds or less.
68 per cent of all holiday shoppers using their smartphones and/or tablets say they would try a mobile site or app one more time if it did not work the first time – an immediate loss of 32 per cent of shoppers.
Your apps are your brands – and if they deliver poor experiences the world will hear about it as 59 per cent of Australian Millennials (and 51 per cent of global Millennials) say they are likely to complain on social media about a poor online shopping experience.

Millennials prefer mobile apps

– 54 per cent of Millennials prefer to use company-specific mobile applications rather than company websites when shopping on smartphones and/or tablets. Why? Because 62 per cent of global Millennials (65 per cent of Australian Millennials) say that mobile applications have better user experience and performance than sites.

The bottom line…

Millennials show us a clear path – companies will win or fail based on customer experiences they deliver at every opportunity along the digital shopping journey – web, mobile web and mobile apps – no matter where customers are – at home on the couch, in their office and even when they are inside stores shopping.

Customers’ behaviours and expectations continue to change and digital transformation should not focus only on getting a 360° view of their customers, it’s all about the delivered user experiences too. You need to deliver at scale, across channels with a special focus on mobile or suffer the consequence.

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