In this rapidly-growing competitive market, the ability to analyze customer behavior in retail shops has never been greater. And with the growing popularity of eCommerce, the importance of in-store analytics (IsA) has gone off the roof.
Conventional retailers are aggressively implementing in-store analytics to win their customers back from their direct eCommerce competitors. Hence, we can very well see that in-store analytics have become an essential part of conventional physical stores.
So how does retail in store analytics work? Take a peek.
Retail In-Store Analytics: How Does it Work?
In-store analytics (IsA) can very well change the way a physical store functions as a whole. From normal functionality to marketing strategies, in-store analytics can play a key role in changing everything from the head to the toe.
So how does it work?
In-store analytics is basically the process of finding meaningful insights from customers’ behavioral data. Such insights aid retailers a lot in devising strategies to incorporate innovative cutting edge technologies in their physical stores to make shopping fun, convenient and more meaningful.
Things like smart carts embedded with location beacons, store WiFi and cameras can give retailers a detailed overview of their customers’ wants, shopping trends, buying patterns and so on. Such process can also impart basic data such as customers’ gender and age group.
What Data Do Retailers Need?
Retailers need as much information as they can get from their customers. Some of these include things like:
Who Came and Left Without Buying Anything? Why?
Your will probably see many customers coming into your shops and leaving without actually purchasing anything. Why? In-store analytics can give you valuable information that can aid you a lot in getting the answer to that question.
Is There Anything Missing from the Shopping Cart?
Most retailers know about those wares or commodities that are purchased from their physical stores. They know the things well that sell as hot cakes in their respective stores. But what about the ones that don’t sell too well among their customers? Retailers need to know about them as well. In-store analytics can aid with that.
Is Everything Safe and Sound?
To be more specific, the term that I should use here is “security.” Retailers do want to know whether their store’s secured from all sorts of outside threats or not. Analytics data can help them confirm that fact. Is there any spot too vulnerable? IsA can find that out.
Let’s go through the benefits of in-store analytics in greater details.
The Benefits of In-Store Analytics
In-store Analytics Helps in Improving Shopping Experience
Like I said before, IsA convey a huge amount of customer data to the retailers ranging from their buying patterns to buying preferences. Such data helps physical stores a lot in improving their customers’ shopping experience by learning from prior experiences.
In-store Analytics Helps to Improve Customer Support
If you want to improve your customer service, customer insights and other related data are your only ways to achieve that.
You may think that surveys might be enough to fulfill this purpose of yours. But that’s not the proper solution because you’ll hardly get genuine responses from such campaigns.
Analysis and tracking of customer data are more effective, especially in this purpose. Thus, in-store analytics comes again to your rescue for the umpteenth time yet again.
In-store Analytics Helps in Preventing Theft and Burglary
Shoplifting is one of the most common problems of all faced by physical stores almost on a regular basis. IsA helps in analyzing shoplifting behaviors in prospective customers. It also helps retailers identify the spots that are too vulnerable to shop lifting.
Based on analytics data, retailers can take key decisions in strategizing store security thereby keeping theft and burglary at bay.
Image source- Flickr
In-store Analytics Helps in Measuring Store Performance in Real Time
With real time analysis of physical stores, retailers can get answers to those questions that had remained unanswered for quite some time. An example should clear this up.
Example: Consider a scenario where a simple rival campaign brought an absolute revolution in a store’s conversion rate from a visitor to a customer. That simple campaign can even be a form of window marketing.
Through analysis of real-time analytics data, you can definitely get to the reasons for which the campaign gained such a huge success. Thus, the importance of in-store analytics gets highlighted yet again.
What Are the Most Common Areas Where Retailers Use Retail Analytics?
Like I said before, retailers usually use analytics for devising strategies that benefit their stores as a whole. Some of the most common areas are:
- Price deciding and promotions
- Marketing
- Predictive analysis
- Optimizing marketing
- Sales force streamlining
- Analyzing credit risk
- Security
Most of these areas highlighted above play a significant role in the betterment of a physical store. Hence, the importance of analytics data can never be ignored.
In fact on the hindsight, it looks like that analytics data is not just a luxury anymore. It has become a very part of the necessity.
Retail Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “A Comprehensive Overview of In-Store Analytics for Retailers” was first published on Small Business Trends