Seniors now spend more time on the Internet than any other consumer category. Impatient and often allergic to technology, retired people expect the web to be easy and accessible to them. But how can e-commerce sites be adapted to this customer population, often overlooked by digital and marketing departments?
Acquisition managers spend lavishly on keywords to recruit retirees as customers. The latter are then redirected to e-commerce sites whose UX (user experience) is poorly adapted to their use. Illegible fonts, overly technical functionalities and incomprehensible language are all the more obstacles to encouraging purchases and brand loyalty.
To better understand the expectations of customers over 60, the EKOO team conducted a behavioral study and interviewed senior Internet users. Here are the 3 main expectations that e-tailers must meet:
What are the best practices for retaining senior and retired customers on e-commerce sites?
- Make your site easier to read! Don't forget that people's eyesight diminishes after the age of 40!
- Reassure your customers! Facilitate access to information and be transparent!
- Make your e-Commerce site simple! Think simple web!
#Make your site easier to read! Don't forget that people's eyesight diminishes after the age of 40!
"Every time I have to buy on the Internet, I get annoyed! I never know where to click, and I spend all my time enlarging the text on the sites with my tablet! " says Gilles, a 61-year-old lawyer.
When teams work on ergonomics, they don't think about the visual comfort of senior citizens. According to our study, the loss of comfort begins when text fonts are smaller than 14 pixels.
The easier it is to read, the more the senior will have a first impression of satisfaction with the information they discover.
What's more, a senior citizen doesn't approach a web page in the same way as a younger surfer. In most cases, older people read a web page as they would a book.
So there are three things to bear in mind when building your website for senior citizens:
Most of the time, the senior citizen reads what appears above the waterline.. It's not natural for them to scroll. The information above the waterline conditions their web behavior for further reading. The organization and type of content that appears above the waterline must therefore be given particular importance in order to capture the interest of senior citizens.
Adapt to their use!
Seniors' attention is not intuitively drawn to the usual buttons. The "Home" button, for example, to return to the home page, is rarely used by seniors.
" I never know how to go back or find my basket when I go to a new site. The worst are the sites that claim to be trendy and flash all over the place! I want to wear sunglasses when I'm on the Adidas site! When I wanted to buy some Adidas sneakers, I couldn't figure out how to find the model I was looking for. I really felt like an old man out of touch" François, retired, aged 71.
A navigation menu and tree structure with a font that's too small or even unintuitive, as is often the case on smartphones, can discourage senior citizens from venturing onto your site.
Finally, senior citizens seem to be insensitive, even irritable, to intrusive advertising animations or videos. Supposed to make a site more dynamic and interactive, animations can even drive them away.
#Reassure your customers! Facilitate access to information and be transparent!
" I worry every time I have to enter my credit card number. I'm always afraid I'll get the wrong item, that I've chosen the right size or that it's compatible. What' s more, most of the time it's illegible ." Odile, 73 years old, retired.
The COVID period, which isolated retirees, clearly forced them to overcome their last psychological barriers to digital. With zoom aperitifs with the grandchildren, they became familiar with video. They opened up to lesser-known social networks like Pinterest and Instagram, which saw seniors grow in significant numbers by 2021. Then, unable to buy in-store equipment, they had to learn to trust e-tailers. But once converted, don't forget to give them access to services that will reassure them. Seniors are impatient, and don't have time to waste on your site. When they have a question or are looking for information, they need an immediate response.
To satisfy web customers over the age of sixty, adapt your customer service, and set up a telephone hotline that will enable them to get in touch immediately to encourage purchases.
Feed your product sheets with effective information, with accessible and simple text for features, and integrate voice testimonials from your teams to make your products more understandable.
Don't forget to get your other senior customers talking too, with voice reviews. If they can listen to the experience of customers like themselves, it's a sure-fire way to reassure them! And by listening to voice testimonials, you can get round the problem of small print on telephones.
#Make your e-commerce site easy to use!
" When I was piloting the construction of ZODIO's international ecommerce site, the teams didn't have the reflex to adapt the models and functionalities for ALL web users. Web teams are often very young and think the web for themselves. It was when we organized round tables with our customers that we realized that our site was excluding some of our customers. Émilie Brossier, ecommerce director, Groupe ADEO.
When you're thinking about creating an e-commerce site, challenge your teams to wipe the slate clean of any prior knowledge or preconceptions they may have as ordinary web surfers or e-marketing professionals. Give them just one recipe: keep it simple and think mobile first!
And yes, seniors are now all connected and equipped with smartphones! 60% of them start looking for product information on their cell phone. But they have to give up because of the discomfort they experience while browsing.
To avoid losing your hard-to-recruit visitors, make sure your site is easy to understand. To do this, work upstream on the organization and visualization of the site. To optimize content, it's important to remember that senior citizens, who are less resourceful than the average Internet user, want immediate access to the information they're looking for. It is therefore necessary to oversimplify the content and the message to be conveyed. In the case of multiple answers to a question, it is preferable to direct the senior to the full version of these answers by means of links, even if these send him or her to the bottom of the page.
Observe by putting yourself in condition.
If you're building a site for seniors, there are three things to consider:
- Their ability to concentrate depends on their interest in the content. To test the quality of your content, perform a simple exercise. Check whether the page answers the question the senior is asking himself, based on the query he entered on Google.
- Their computer skills may be very limited, hence the importance of optimized natural referencing. After sending an e-mail, searching on Google is the second action that seniors learn to do on the Internet. Think about orienting your content as if your visitor were speaking to you, as it's important to bear in mind that senior internet users are increasingly using the voice function with the microphone to dictate their Google searches.
-The intellectual curiosity of senior citizens is highly random and varies from one Internet user to another, resulting in a lack of patience on the part of most seniors, who quickly become discouraged if they can't find the information they're looking for.
Then, there's only one recipe: test.
A/B testing is an effective method for experimenting with web user behavior on several test pages.
Then all that's left to do is monitor the relevant performance indicators, such as bounce rate, conversion rate and time spent on your pages. Testing the voice experience on your site? Track the impact of your performance indicators on the product sheets concerned. On some sites, they have been multiplied by 5 for this target group of senior citizens.
In conclusion, if you want your web strategy to succeed, it's essential to break down an initial preconception: if senior citizens have time to waste, they also hate wasting time. So cut to the chase and keep it simple!
