The Truth about Millennials

All this fuss about ‘millennials’ and it turns out they aren’t so different after all.

Bluecore, an e-commerce SaaS platform, commissioned research on consumers in the US who had made an online purchase in the previous three months.

They wanted to find out how millennials engage with brands online compared to other generations — Gen X, Gen Z and so called ‘Baby Boomers’.

Overall, it turns out that across all demographic groups, email was the most preferred option of brand messaging. By a long shot.

Nuances per age group appeared, for example, only 2% of millennials wanted to receive messages via YouTube (compared with zero for GenZ) and only 7% wanted brand communications via Facebook.

Millennials are born between 1980 and 2000 and represent about 35% of the world’s population. The scary thing is that they will form 75% of the active workforce by 2030 (but they will be older too).

Considered confident and achievement oriented with high expectations, smart personalisation with smart appropriate marketing messages seems to be the best option to build rapport with them.

Hence why more than two-thirds of them say they believe email is the most personal way that they can interact with brands — as they have actively chosen to be contacted this way as opposed to assumed consent with retargeting across the web.

And that is why if brands want to focus on personalisation, they should and will need to communicate via their own media channels and not be at the “mercy of the algorithms” of social platforms that are subject to change without notice. The most recent change, for example, with Facebook in June 2016 resulted with the reach of brands on the platform dropping by 42% within a month — which is staggering considering the investment in content and resource used to build that reach and loyalty originally.

Sharing the right message and offers at the right time is the real goal of personalisation and it looks like email has it licked.

Recruiting your customers or audience with reason to communicate with them is the starting point and that’s where the marketing begins.