4 Ways Pest Control Companies Can Win Millennial Customers

This new decade is continuing a trend that has been going for a number of years. 2019 was the first year in which the millennial generation had more buying power than baby boomers. Buying power is continuing to shift at an increasing rate.

With almost 10,000 baby boomers retiring every single day, it is more important than ever before that pest control companies understand how to build relationships with millennial customers.

In addition to this, the PPMA found that more than 70% of millennials regularly use pest control services and are more likely to call a professional, rather than attempting any DIY solutions.

So what does this mean for the pest control industry? There are 4 major ways that companies need to shift in order to claim millennial customers:

• Improve your online presence
• Build your online reviews
• Adopt digital payment options
• Adapt your customer service

Improve Your Online Presence

88% of consumers spend time researching a product and company online prior to making a purchase. If you aren’t easy to find online, then it will be next to impossible to grow your millennial customer base.

Read our Ultimate Guide to Pest Control Marketing to learn how to grow your digital presence across a number of disciplines, including:

• Website
• SEO
• Local marketing
• PPC
• Social media
• Email marketing

Building a holistic marketing presence across as many of these disciplines as possible is going to be the best method of claiming this growing business.

Build Your Online Reviews

Over time, digital reviews have become increasingly important to consumers. 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust their friends. In addition to being a positive signal for ranking in local search, the volume and quality of your reviews is invaluable in driving new business.

So how can you acquire more reviews? As crazy as this sounds… just ask!

So many companies think they aren’t allowed to ask for reviews, but if left to their own devices, customers will fall back to their human nature and only leave reviews when they have a negative experience.

Train your staff to recognize when customers are having a positive experience with you, and then prompt those individuals to leave a review. It is also important to aggregate and amplify the reviews you get as much as possible. A platform like FreshLime has the tools to not only acquire but also amplify these reviews.

Adopt Digital Payment Options

Only 26% of consumer payments in the US were made with cash. Not only that, many consumers are even shifting away from plastic.

Digital payments, as you might expect, are gaining increasing traction among younger consumers. According to FIS, “Payments can have a social component, he said, where divvying up a dinner bill can be done through Venmo or Zelle or other peer-to-peer (P2P) options.”

In addition to this, the current pandemic has pushed even more of the population to prefer digital payment options. More than 6.1 billion people are forecasted to use digital payment options by 2023.

What does this mean for pest control companies? Requiring antiquated forms of payment is going to be one of the quickest ways to antagonize millennial consumers.

Adopting a digital form of accepting payments not only meets the needs of these customers, it will also streamline the billing process and improve office efficiency.

Adapt Your Customer Service

Given that only 30% of millennials feel loyal to brands, it is hugely important to craft a positive customer experience for this demographic. So what is the ideal customer experience for millennials? 

This demographic is filled with digital natives who are having their expectations set by the tech giants of the world. Every interaction your team has with them needs to reinforce that you value their business and that they are calling the shots. 

Instant gratification is deeply ingrained in these buyers which means they need to have easy access to schedule or reschedule appointments, pay their bills, and file complaints—all through whatever communication style they prefer. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that millennials hate talking on the phone, but it might surprise you that the actual telephone app (the app used to make and receive phone calls, listen to voice mail, etc.) is only the 5th most used app on their phone. 

In contrast to this, 68% of millennials admitted to “texting a lot” on a daily basis. Having text-based options for everything customers need to do will really help you to find and keep millennials customers.

Next Steps

Luckily enough, these are several of the areas of improvement that Briostack was built to facilitate for pest control companies. Request a demo to see how we can help take your company to the next level.