Targeting Millennials And Gen-Z Could Help Save Holiday 2020 Shopping

Driving sales by riding the new wave.

While the holiday shopping season will undoubtedly look much different this year, the news of a total washout has been greatly exaggerated. The National Retail Federation estimates retail sales will actually rise to $656 billion and online sales to jump to $117 billion this year, up 3.6 and 10 percent from 2019. Despite the pandemic, consumers are still shopping. And those shoppers set to drive the holiday season have to be the reliable primary heads-of-household, right? Well, not exactly.

There’s an opportunity here for retailers to capture a huge chunk of spending potential, but only if they approach it from the right perspective. It’s not just mom and dad doing the buying anymore — millennial and gen-Z customers are the missing link.

This semi-shift isn’t all too surprising. The uncertain reality of COVID-19 changed American consumer preferences overnight earlier in the year, causing retailers to respond to these unpredictable preferences. A Salesforce report found that 62 percent of consumers are doing less in-store shopping because of the pandemic, with early three-quarters of millennials and gen-Z consumers expecting this behavior to stick well beyond the pandemic. More consumers have gone online, foregoing in-store hassles and health risks. This means contactless payments will gradually become more of a norm, and omnichannel interactions will define how shoppers find items, how they pay for them, and when they make a sale.

What once was, isn’t necessarily what will be — now more than ever — and these changes will only continue to grow despite a vaccine on the horizon. People want what they want, so retailers must throw everything they thought they knew out to give it to them. These digital-first routes aren’t necessarily catered to the older generations, who would much rather the old shopping experience go back to the way they were. Millennial and gen-Z consumers have already changed their shopping behaviors more than older generations.

A millennial and gen-Z audience is shopping at a growing rate, and there is a huge opportunity for brands to better understand this deeply online segment with significant spending power even more. Just look at Nike’s big boom this year. That is a brand that figured out how to leverage digital channels more effectively. With the holiday shopping season upon us, marketing campaigns must meet these segments where they are. The problem is that each shopper has their own personal preferences, meaning there must be a more bespoke level of interaction to offer customers to create much-needed sales.

A solution like RevTrax offers enterprises the promotion optimization solutions they need to effectively engage visitors using personalized offers, online-to-offline tracking and powerful first-party data for retailers to make the significant business impacts they need with such a crucial segment of shoppers. The granular needs of millennial and gen-z drivers of this holiday 2020 shopping wave can be met with such omnichannel-friendly solutions like path-to-purchase tracking, advanced data science to gain offer analytics, insights, and optimizations that lead to not just a holiday boom, but long-term dividends for retailers.

Interested in learning more? We would love to help with your promotional marketing needs. Learn how RevTrax’s solutions can help your brand during this holiday season by speaking with a specialist today.

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