Knowing who to advertise to is one of the biggest challenges you'll face as an eCommerce merchant. Having a good product and quality systems in place to manage orders, returns, customer service, and inventory is certainly key to running a successful online storefront - but without effective advertising (which leads to sales), none of it matters! To increase the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising efforts, it's essential that you know your target demographic.
Demographics and Your eCommerce Store
It can be difficult to pinpoint your eCommerce storefront's target demographic, and it's especially difficult if you have a unique product and can't lean on historical marketing data for a related product. It can take a lot of marketing research and some different testing with your advertising campaigns to find your primary eCommerce demographic - but don't give up! Pinpointing the online shopper demographic that you want to target is truly the key to your Etsy or Shopfiy store's ultimate success. Let's take a look at some notable eCommerce demographic statistics that can hopefully help you along the way in your search for your store's perfect online shopper profile.
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- 86% of Millennials in the US shop online.
- 67% of Millennials prefer shopping online to in-store.
- Millennials are expected to account for 30% of all online shopping in 2021.
- Approximately 80% of Gen X-ers shop online.
- Over 55% of Gen X-ers prefer to shop online.
- Approximately 60% of Baby Boomers shop online.
- Over 40% of Baby Boomers prefer to shop online.
- Men spend an average of 28% more money shopping online.
- 25% of Americans shop online at least once a month.
What Demographic Buys the Most eCommerce Products?
If your brand is targeting a specific gender, it is vital to understand how different genders shop online. Men tend to be more logical online shoppers and treat the process like a mission with a straightforward goal and product in mind, whereas women enjoy the shopping process more as a whole and are more influenced by reviews and ratings. Because of that, women spend more overall time online shopping compared to men, yet men tend to spend 28% more than women when online shopping. This information can really help guide the marketing efforts of your eCommerce store! For example, if your eCommerce product is primarily geared towards women, you know that you'll want to put more effort into getting more positive customer reviews and providing consumers with more materials that help elevate your shopping process. Let's dive a little deeper on some of the differences between how men and women shop online.
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eCommerce Demographic Targeting by Location
When it comes to researching your target demographic for your online store, location is a hugely important factor to consider. Some products will just do better in certain areas than others - for instance if you sell a surfing-related product, you may find that you want to target certain coastal areas where surfing is more popular to more effectively spend your advertising dollars. This of course varies by product, but most eCommerce merchants know their product well enough to at least have an idea of where their product sells better which gives you a great jumping off point when it comes to targeting locations.
And when talking about what locations to target, it's worth mentioning that the U.S.A. is one of the world's largest online-spending nations in the world, second only to China. Additionally, Americans spend a pretty large chunk of time online shopping - averaging 5 hours per week!
While the U.S.A. certainly has one of the more robust eCommerce markets, it's considerably smaller than China's. China's eCommerce market is estimated at $672 billion, with the U.S.A. at an estimated $340 billion, and the United Kingdom at $99 billion. With markets that size, you know you are going to want to target these locations, and if you are able to narrow your scope down as it relates to gender and age, you're likely going to be watching your eCommerce sales skyrocket!
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How to Drive More Purchases to your eCommerce Store
Do eCommerce consumers really care about customer service? Of course!! Americans tell an average of 15 people about their poor customer service experience, and only 11 people about a good one. This puts a lot of pressure on businesses to optimize their customer service experience - especially considering 33% of Americans report they would switch to a competitor after a poor customer service experience. In fact, U.S. companies tend to lose a good amount of money every year just off their poor customer service - an average of $62 billion annually to be exact. Just as it is important to not have bad customer service, it is actually hugely beneficial to have great customer service! It has been found that an increase in the quality of customer service offerings directly correlates to an increase in profits.
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Targeting eCommerce Consumers
Your online business’s specific target market will differ depending on your product, pricing, and many other factors. Make sure you are gathering and analyzing your data so that you're continuously developing and honing in on who exactly your ideal eCommerce customer is! Location, gender, age, income, and other factors can help you narrow your marketing so that you're not wasting advertising dollars on unlikely purchasers. We hope this information can help guide you as you start to try and better narrow the demographics that your eCommerce store is targeting.
That's all for this week's edition of The New Yak Times, tune in next week and subscribe below!
