Retail TouchPoints: In-Store Insights Help Turn Browsers Into Buyers
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.
A missed opportunity is walking out of stores every day: the browsers who could be buyers, and about whom most retailers have little or no information.
Most of the analysis that's done today is based on POS data. If 80 percent of the people that come into the store don't make a purchase, they are absent from the analysis that retailers use to feed decision-making. Other than door counters used at a small percentage of retail outlets, there has, historically, been very little intelligence or insights available about browsers in-store.
But advances in video cameras and related technologies is making the gathering, quantifying and analyzing of such in-store visual customer intelligence possible. With the latest solutions, store management can see where shoppers stop and spend time, what areas of the store get the most traffic and which the least. Traffic to, and engagement with, promotional displays can be measured and analyzed.
Among the ways visual customer intelligence can be used to better target shoppers:
Labor - Match Staffing and Traffic Levels: Staff scheduling, commonly based on transaction volume, does not account for the highly variable nature of conversion rates by hour of the day and day of the week at both store and department levels. For example, in one retail outlet, a 40 - 50 percent drop in conversions was recorded in the early afternoon; store operations was able to trace that drop to staff members leaving the sales floor to manage inventory in the stockroom. In another store, visual customer intelligence showed that employees were twice as busy on weekends, serving double the number of customers. The store was able to more efficiently adjust staffing levels to better balance weekdays and weekends traffic.
Marketing - Measure Marketing Effectiveness: With a view of how many customers entered the promotional zone and engaged with the product, combined with sales for that product, marketing professionals can see the actual impact of their campaigns. They also will have the ability to troubleshoot, and make small tweaks that turn browsers into buyers.
Merchandising - Know Where Your Browsers Go: Imagine the power of witnessing a 300 percent difference in browsers between the busiest and next busiest branded promotion area, and what that means in terms of the relative value of that space. In one instance, one retail customer was concerned when a heavily promoted product was not selling as well as expected. Analysis of in-store traffic flow and engagement data revealed that the product was located in a promotional zone where only four percent of shoppers ever ventured. The product was moved to an area that recorded high traffic regularly, with a subsequent sales uplift for that product of 35 percent over other stores in the chain.