By Andreas Pouros, COO, Greenlight
It’s fair to say that over the last few years, millennials have been the focus of marketing activity for many brands. However, with the knowledge that by 2025, two-thirds of all retail activity will be undertaken by the over 55’s, now is the time to shift the focus.
We recently conducted a survey of 1,000 consumers aged 55+ from across the UK to understand their online habits and spending patterns*. The reason for this was simple: this demographic is often considered to have little online presence. However, this growing number of digitally-minded over 55’s are quite the opposite. Our research confirmed our thoughts, and revealed some interesting stats that would make any brand think twice before disregarding this group.
Today, the 55+ market spends £14.45 billion online, thus to assume they’re not digitally-savvy is negligent, especially considering a large number of our respondents use multiple devices to go online. We call them the digiboomers.
Full circle online shopping behaviour
Our findings certainly underline the market potential in terms of spend, but what’s also interesting is why this demographic enjoys shopping online.
We found that many of those asked would use more than one device to get online, which confirms the proliferation of multi-device households across Britain. Laptops took pole position with two in three stating a preference (66%), closely followed by desktop computers (59%) and tablets (52%). These figures help to show how connected this generation are, but also that they enjoy browsing from mobile devices for convenience, where three quarters were lured by the ability to shop at any time of day and 70% preferred shopping online for the ease of home delivery.
A clear finding is that the shopping journey is conducted online from start to finish. Digiboomers will search and compare reviews online, check their bank accounts, take part in online chats or forums, and make purchases online. Despite having a strong online presence on the high street (in particular post-retirement when high street spend grows by £4.19 per person per month), more than three quarters (76%) of digiboomers will shop online at least once a month, with many spending more online per month for purchases below £60 than they would on the high street.
This brings to light the importance of online reviews and forums when doing pre-purchase research. Armed with the right information, they’ll more than likely spend more if the purchase is backed by consumer reviews – something which is hard to achieve in-store.
And what are they spending their money on? There was a lot of variety which was reflective of tendencies from all age groups, but specifically digiboomers bought books and magazines (76%), clothing and accessories (74%), CDs and DVDs (66%), small appliances and houseware (61%) and consumer electronics (60%).
Another key insight is that there is a near-equal split in terms of total spend between men and women, with women spending slightly more online than men by £1.85 per month, where average monthly spends totals £65.09 online compared to £73.52 on the high street.
As the gap between the high street and online shopping narrows, it’s time for marketers and retailers alike to take digiboomers into consideration. With only one in five marketers targeting them, there’s a huge opportunity being lost. We’ll be conducting more research into this area to uncover key insights into online preferences and drivers, which we’ll research at an exclusive panel event in September. Until then, keep up with our latest insights through our #digiboomers hashtag.
*The research was conducted in June 2015 in partnership with Redshift Research
