Customer Experience

By adaptive - April 15th, 2014

The Millennial generation remain the most lucrative shoppers. Corporations though, should become intimately aware of the gender divide

Last week we considered how gender impacts on social commerce, and discovered that paying close attention to the gender of your company’s customers – especially when engaging with then on social media – is a vital component of all marketing strategies.

If you look even closer at the make up of your business’ social media followers it becomes clear that the Millennials (anyone born between 1980 and 200 – often referred to as Gen Y shoppers) are a massive component of today’s social media commerce, but that women once again dominate the buying activity that brands see.

The Millennials are forecast to command over $2 billion dollars in spending power by 2015. Women in this group are much more likely to share links and direct their networks to brands they favour, which results in an estimated 3.77 in referral clicks.

Insights into Social Purchase Sharing:

• Average number of purchases shared per person for Gen Y males is 1.50 whereas this number for Gen X males is 1.18.
• 80% of Gen X females are likely to share purchases on social media. This number is slightly lower at 62.6% for Gen Y females.

Insights into referral traffic generated from social purchase sharing:

• Millennial females result in highest number of referral clicks per shared purchase.
• Referral clicks from a socially shared purchase by millennial females is 52.63% higher than those from millennial males.

Insight into influence of purchase sharing by socially popular millennial users:

• Millennial with more than 900 Facebook friends generate 3.95 times more referral traffic to retailers than those with less than 100 Facebook friends.

“Millennial are a tech-savvy generation and are always connected on social media. They are driving the social commerce worldwide and retailers are exploring newer avenues to convert their Likes, Tweets, Pins into sales.” commented Jai Rawat, CEO, ShopSocially. “Understanding their social commerce behaviour is of foremost importance for retailers to engage effectively with millennial and to convert them into loyal customers.”

For all corporations social media has become a new battelground, but a battleground that has divided across more than simply economic lines. Gender has of course played a massive role in all marketing, but social media offers an opporunity to not only identify gender preference, but also highly focused groups and even individuals that are receptive to your marketing messages. Gen Y are active across all social media networks. Corporations now need to ensure they understand motivation and how gender influences these actions.

[Image Source: Freedigitalphotos.net]