Baby Boomers Holiday Shopping
Almost 30% of active Internet users are baby boomers – that’s 55.6 million people 55 and older. These are the people with discretionary income who shopping for second homes, cruises, new cars, and other goodies most families with kids at home can’t afford.
Now let’s look at the holiday shopping season. eMarketer estimates a 10% increase in online holiday sales – $32 billion. Shoppers will be purchasing from the Internet to save gas money and to take advantage of free shipping offers.
Lots of Spending Money
If you’re selling products online, remember those baby boomers have lots of spending money:
The boomers’ collective wallet will only get fatter as they continue working. As a group, people age 50 to 60 are flush, with more than $1 trillion of spending power a year, about double the spending power of today’s 60-to-70-year-olds. They’re likely to be vigorous consumers as they empty the nest, take on new jobs, relocate, support children they had in their 40s, go back to school, start a second or third career, remarry, inherit money from their savings-minded parents, pursue new hobbies, and tackle the health issues of aging. “Marketers are slowly waking up,” says Matt Thornhill, president of the Boomer Project, a Richmond (Va.) consulting firm. “If you’re going to expand your business, you will have to market to the aging boomer.” – Businessweek.com
If you’re focus is on the younger demographics at the exclusion of baby boomers, you are missing a potentially huge opportunity to tap into a large, diverse, and fast-growing segment of the U.S. Internet population this holiday season.
Make Your Site Search Engine and Shopper Friendly
You don’t have much time left, but you can still make the small tweaks that will make your site better optimized for search engines as well as user friendly to older visitors:
Design:
- Use dark type on a light background and avoid patterns
- Use a font size larger than 10 point in Arial or Tahoma
Layout:
- Make sure your pages load quickly
- Use the same style throughout the site
- Make site navigation consistent and easy to understand
- Provide “Previous/Next” buttons
- Keep your pages clean and uncluttered
Content:
- Use bold type to highlight key terms
- Underline your links; make visited links a different color
- Attention-grabbing features on a page should be links
- Left justify body text (other than headings)
- Don’t make visitors scroll down or use pull down menus
Check your titles and meta descriptions too. You’ll have a lot of competition in search, and you want the title to be as well optimized as possible, with a description that will encourage people to visit your site. Include a call to action in it if you can.
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