How to Target Millennials with M-Commerce This Holiday Season

Target the Millennials is the new buzzword in the eCommerce world? Millennials? Doesn't that ring a bell for you? Okay. Millennials is used in reference to the digitally-driven American teenagers and twenty-somethings who have become prime new targets of eCommerce marketers. And if you happen to run an eCommerce store that's targeted toward the millennial generation, then it's time to make your site mobile-optimized. 
 
Here are three key considerations when optimizing your website for mobile:

1. Spotlight On The Site:

With the millennials going mobile crazy, Google doesn't wish to disappoint them. The search engine giant recently announced that mobile site optimization has to be factored in if websites really want to make it big on mobile rankings. 
 
Important Takeaways:
  • Observe it's best practices on smartphone-optimized websites.
  • If responsive design doesn't work for you, Google supports dynamically-served HTML.
  • Flat, clean and simple website design
  • Improve page load times.
For websites that are not mobile-ready, it's recommended to focus on introducing small changes to the revenue-driving pages and custom landing pages.

And also use Google Analytics “Speed Suggestions” report to figure out those pages that are not doing well, and use PageSpeed Insights tool to address the critical issues.

2. Spotlight On The Content:

Google's killer Hummingbird algorithm helps mobile users search faster and better. Their conversational queries are addressed on the go. With countdown for holiday season starting, it becomes all the more important to produce content with upcoming seasonal offers for mobile-optimized landing pages. 
 
Important Takeaways:
  • Create categories and optimize content for each category.
  • Craft creative landing page content, using holiday keyword trends and by introducing offers that could be social or local.
  • Avoid flash on your landing pages for it's not supported by mobile.
  • Succinct content, as mobile users wish to access what they need quickly.
  • Make the most of social media: tweet about products, generate blog posts, link and optimize landing pages.
  • Craft original content for social media.
  • Link and also optimize your landing pages around short-term/holiday conversion campaigns.
3. Spotlight on Conversions:
 
Though the average conversion rate of a desktop is slightly better (1.0% for desktop and 0.3 for smartphones) than smartphones, the purchase cycle is fairly quick for mobile searchers. According to Google research, 81 percent of conversions happen within 5 hours. And more importantly, the entertainment and media industry have better conversion rate on mobiles than desktops. 
 
Important Takeaways:
 
Find out what the customer does with his mobile? Do they email stuff to themselves to review later? Do they use it to compare items? Do they use it for making fast purchases? Tailor mobile capabilities to address their needs immediate and/or long. These needs may evolve as the holiday season grows closer.

Make use of video content. It's a well-acknowledged fact that entertainment and media industries using video content have more conversions on mobile than desktop.

Track mobile’s role in analytics, given that every mobile search leads to meaningful outcomes, such as sharing information on the page, calling businesses or checking out the physical store.

Make conversions simple — the fewer clicks, the better on mobile. Ensure the call-to-actions is installed above the fold for mobile users for consumers may not scroll to the bottom of the page to find your “Buy” button.

5 Top eCommerce Trends For 2014

With the passage of time, eCommerce is getting more advanced and sophisticated. Just take this year's Super Bowl as an example. NFL conducted massive location-based marketing campaign in which the league's wireless transmitters interacted with fans' smartphones. The result: fans could find all the information, including hot dog stalls and T-shirt shops, with a push of a button. If you want to remain a front runner in this made race of eCommerce, you have to offer something outstanding in terms of shopping experience. You have to know what will work in the short term as well as in the long term. Let's have a look at the top five eCommerce trends that will drive 2014.
 
Mobile

Gone are the days when having an eCommerce presence was an option. On Black Friday 2013, 40% of the online sales were from mobile devices. And these numbers are expected to double in 2014. In light of this information, it would be no wonder if location-based marketing takes off like a rocket. To stay on the top of the competition, you will have to look for ways to optimize the store/website for mobile devices. And when we talk about optimization, we are talking about each and every element, starting from layout to design to content to checkout process.

Personalization

One of the ways to triumph over the competition is by offering highly personalized shopping experience to the users. With the use of 3D printing, you can create attractive and unique designs that appeal to the target audience. You can also utilize past sales data and shopping history of the customers to create customized deals and offers for them. It's even possible to create various versions of home pages that will be rendered depending on the location of the user. For example, you can create one look for New York users and another for California users.

Less options

Years of study has revealed that although customers have spent hours at end to browse through various options and compare products, once they have found what they need, they order it and move on to something else. Businesses have already started focusing less on browsing and more on helping customers find what they were looking for. Hence, extra clutter is being replaced by meaningful content that can help users make better buying decision.

Low latency

As computers and smartphones become more advanced and efficient, internet gets faster. And as internet gets faster, the user's tolerance for high loading speed becomes less. So if any website is taking ages to load, users will simply abandon them. Businesses have started realizing this and so they are adopting responsive web designs and adaptive web designs to make their websites faster and sleeker. To manage the costs, businesses have even started creating layers of data to keep the most important data on faster hardware such as flash storage, and less relevant data on cheaper hardware such as hard disks.

Outstanding customer experience

Unless you keep your customers happy, it's impossible to survive in the eCommerce rat race. And to keep customers happy, you have to offer outstanding customer experience through engaging and interesting content, additional services and easy-to-use features.