45% of Millennials Use Voice Assistants While Shopping According to a New Study
CouponFollow’s Millennial Shopping Report 2019 says that 45% of millennials use voice assistants while shopping. The survey of 1,002 millennials in the U.S. ages 22-37 was conducted in January 2019. This doesn’t say that 45% of millennials are using voice assistant for all of their shopping needs or that they are consummating the purchase by voice. However, it is another indicator that voice can be a useful aid in the shopping process such as searching for products or accessing product reviews. This expanded view of voice shopping versus voice commerce was first introduced in Voicebot’s 2018 Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report.
This data from CouponFollow is about voice assistants across all device surfaces. The 2019 U.S. Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report by Voicebot and Voicify found that 41% of all device owners had conducted a product search on their smart speakers and 28% say they do so monthly. Voicebot’s cohorts are slightly broader than Millennials alone, but the data show that 18-44-year-olds are slightly more likely than all device owners to use smart speakers for product search and no more likely to make purchases by voice on a monthly basis.
The takeaway for consumer brands should be clear from this and other data. Voice assistants are increasingly popular tools for search and that includes product search which often initiates a buying process. That means companies need to have a voice strategy for making their products and services discoverable through voice assistants. An absence in this rising product discovery channel could result in lost sales to more nimble competitors. This need is likely to be more acute if a company’s target customers are of the millennial generation.
Google Assistant Leads for Product Search Among Millennials
The CouponFollow survey also found that Google Assistant was the most popular voice assistant for shopping-related research at 24% followed by Apple Siri at 19% and Amazon Alexa with 18%. Outside of smart speakers, Alexa typically trails Google Assistant use by a larger margin because it lacks a smartphone OS. However, this is retail-specific and two-thirds of the millennials in the survey said more than half of their online shopping was through Amazon.com.
The data show that if you want to influence millennials shopping with voice assistants, you will need to have a strategy that includes Google, Apple, and Amazon. Optimizing solely for Google search and hoping the knowledge graph alone will make your products and services discoverable is going to miss big parts of the market. You can download the full report from CouponFollow here.
Follow @bretkinsellaFollow @voicebotai
Smart Speaker Owners Agree That Questions, Music, and Weather are Killer Apps. What Comes Next?
Australia Leaps Past U.S. in Smart Speaker Adoption, Google Home Establishes Dominant Market Share
