How To Develop Brand Loyalty With Millennials

Millennials, or people born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are tough customers—in both the literal and proverbial sense. These teenagers to thirty-somethings are the opposite of their parents (typically Baby Boomers): They’ve foregone the traditional economic model in favor of a subscription-based economy, where hefty long-term commitments to a single product or service can be eschewed in favor or a customer-first model, where companies always have to reprove their value in a sea of digital competitors.

Millennials represent the modern customer. In the U.S. they wield over $1 trillion in annual buying power. To convert and retain them, marketers must therefore meet them on their terms: understanding the subscription-based economy, its challenges, its causes, and its values.

‘Flixing Their Muscles

Earlier this year Netflix hit 100 million subscribers, finally eclipsing TV. No one seems to be talking about this, but it’s a cultural milestone. The television era revolutionized marketing, so a shift away from it is meaningful. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Netflix’s numbers have been rising through the years in lockstep with millennials’ growing financial power in the economy. In a recent survey, 92% of millennial respondents claimed to own a Netflix account.

Combine this with the popularity of other subscription services among the age group—Spotify comes to mind, as well as Amazon Prime—and there’s an interesting picture. Millennials are OK with basically renting a service or product, indefinitely. This means brands looking to inspire loyalty should show they can fill a need that will be there for a long time, and should show they can fill that need in a user-friendly and convenient way. A way that could, in theory, impress someone enough that they’d even be willing to pay a small fee for the next couple years.

Motivations for Subscribing

Before we dive into how marketers can capitalize on the preference millennials have for subscribing, we should first understand why this preference exists in the first place. A lot of digital ink has already been spilled on the topic, but there are two major motivators: Millennials are skeptical consumers, and they have less financial freedom than generations past to make long-term investments in products and services.

On skepticism, Forbes put it best: Since millennials have been “bombarded by advertising claims since they were in utero,” they not only don’t believe these claims “but are suspicious of companies that make them.” This generation doesn’t believe what marketers tell them about a product; they believe what their own research and judgment tells them. They conduct this research both before converting, through product reviews and crowdsourced opinion, and after converting, in a justified belief that in a saturated market, a newer, nicher solution could be just around the corner. Brand names don’t impress them. Actual bona fides do.

On wallet troubles, millennials do, bluntly, have less disposable income than their parents had at their age. A recent Federal Reserve report found they “earn 20% less than Boomers did at [the] same stage of life.” There are many causes for this, including crippling student debt, an undersaturated job market, and the high cost of living in the cities that actually do have jobs. But for our purposes as marketers, we should simply understand (and respect) that subscription as a practice is both more common and more prudent the more limited a customer’s funds are.

Solutions

All of this means that to convert the millennial customer, your marketing must showcase the three main values that work in a subscription-based economy: personalization, educating top of funnel, and a multi-platform presence.

Personalization

The fact millennials don’t care about brand names can be a good thing for marketing teams that play their cards right. While this means that even the millennials who become customers may take longer to grow attached to your company, it also means millennials have an open-door policy: They are more likely in the first place to listen to your pitch, even if you are pitching from a brand they haven’t heard of before. So, if marketers can get their foot in that door, the next key step is to deliver a personalized digital experience.

I’m no stranger to talking about this: I’ve spoken extensively on recommendation engines, for example, which power those products and services that have (not coincidentally) emerged as blue-chip in today’s subscription-based economy. But not every journey can or even should be fueled by recommendation engines. Simpler options are available that can be just as effective in the right circumstances.

Most marketing automation tools (like Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Responsys), for example, enable workflows to be preemptively designed that account for all the meaningful actions a contact can take, and then deliver a corresponding experience or start them on a related journey. For example, a common workflow recipe is to enroll people in educational nurtures (see below) if they’ve visited, say, five high-level pages (or just one or two deeply nested pages).

Education Top of Funnel

To overcome millennials’ skepticism as customers, brands can inspire loyalty by educating them at the top of the funnel. Because this group doesn’t want to be ‘sold to’ by marketers, it’s important for marketers to make millennials feel, well, not ‘sold to’—even though, of course, they’re being sold to! Educating these customers early in the sales cycle serves multiple purposes and benefits both sides.

By providing people with content that proves values—a flow of two-pagers on core competencies, testimonials, case studies, collateral that quickly outlines competitive differentiators—companies show customers that they understand the decision-making power in is customers’ hands. The tone of these educational efforts should be, ‘We want to tell you everything there is to know about our service or product, so you can make an informed decision.’ That’s the tone millennials want, because ultimately they want to be able to independently review their options before making a personal, measured choice they believe in.

So, as long as your educational content is honest, it should align with whatever supplementary research millennial prospects undertake (googling, opinion-crowdsourcing, etc.) Knowledge is power. A better educated prospect is almost always a better customer: in this case, one who reups their subscription, as they received the service or product they thought they would.

Multi-Platform Presence

When I worked for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, we focused on helping marketers and organizations learn how to be “mobile-first.” This was because the numbers don’t lie: More than 85% of U.S. millennials own a smartphone (Nielsen), they interact with those smartphones up to 45 times every day (SDL), and “87% of millennials use between two and three tech devices at least once on a daily basis” (Forbes). In other words, any campaign that doesn’t live simultaneously on multiple platforms is almost certainly not living up to its full conversion potential.

For brands looking to interest mobile millennials, this means two solutions are in order. First, web assets and emails need tos use responsive design, so they can automatically present the optimal experience based on a customer’s device. (Another good thing about responsive design: Google’s algorithm rewards sites that are mobile-friendly with higher visibility in search results.)

Second, this carries implications for social media. Millennials are the most active customer group on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, and social is most often accessed through mobile devices. Moreover, “62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer.”

Multi-platform thus means mobile. And if mobile means social media, that means that good, effective marketing campaigns can’t be web-only—or even web-primary. They must be all-inclusive: for different screen sizes, color capabilities, finger-touch sensitivities. They must be able to seamlessly transition from one device to another, and they must make a push on social media. Moreover, this means that a general brand presence on social media, whether connected to campaign or not, is important to cultivating millennials’ trust.

In Conclusion

Marketers who want to capture that most elusive beast these days—the heart of a millennial—must remember it’s a subscriber’s market out there. The Don Draper types don’t hold the power anymore. Customers do, and millennials know this full-well. Their generational features have helped make a digital economy that thrives not on huge investment upfront, but on continual reupping … that hopefully comes if brands can keep proving and reproving their value. Brands can do this by personalizing engagement, educating millennials with straightforward content, and ensuring their assets work across all digital platforms.