9/30/2015
Attracting Millennials to the Garden Center
Jennifer Polanz
In a recent buZZ! enewsletter and on Twitter, we asked retailers for some of their most successful attempts to drive Millennial foot traffic (that’s people ages 18 to 34). Here are a few of the answers:
“I have noticed family events bring Millennials and their young children into the garden center. We had a very successful event called ‘Mommy & Me Fairy Tea’ (pictured). It was completely sold out. The girls, with their moms, learned about fairies and their purpose in the garden, made a craft and had lunch. We also have an annual fall festival with events geared towards kids.
Our weekly email blasts have been doing well—so much that we forgo an annual ‘snail mail’ fall postcard that costs $8,000 and we brought in as much sales without it. I am highly considering a great reduction in newspaper advertising for the 2016 season. Our efforts may go to more email campaigning, Twitter and Facebook ads.
I have noticed that Millennials want fruit and veggie plants especially and many of them seem to want a landscape plan done up for them, as many of them are novice beginners.”—Amy Draiss, Dayton Nursery
“Targeting them on Facebook with paid/boosted ads. When we started doing this two years ago we saw a 65% increase in brand new customers in that specific demographic.
We added an online catalogue for all [of] our customers to order from via Facebook, email or from our website (not ecommerce, but online ordering [and] pick up at the garden centre). We saw amazing results from this, trying to target the ‘online shoppers’ with this campaign and we are in the finishing stages of our second catalogue. Let’s just say that I have ladies asking to order 2016 spring flowers now in August 2015.
Keywords on social media: hip, unusual, hard to find, interesting, weird. Make your product unique.”—Debbie Foisy, Deb’s Greenhouse GP