Without insight into customer behavior, your sales conversion and marketing tactics are all but useless. You need to understand your customers’ motivations, preferences, and desires to meet their demands and increase sales effectively.
Consider that there is only a 20 to 30% chance that the average customer will purchase in your store. With the odds already stacked against you, you need to do everything you can to understand a customer’s behavior to increase the probability of a purchase. Short of asking your customers directly about their behavior (which is invasive, rude, and not recommended!), what tactics can you use to understand who they are and what they want?
The answer is simple: retail analytics.
A retail analytics solution uses non-invasive and anonymous customer tracking sensors to monitor how many people are coming through your doors, what their age and gender is, how they navigate your store, where they browse, what products they are interested in, how much time they spend in your store, the ratio of customers who actually make a purchase, and what motivated them to do so. The data gathered from the sensors is integrated with advanced analytics software that collects, combines, transforms, and visualizes the data into easy-to-understand and dynamic insights about how to enhance the customer experience.
Customer behavior investigates how individuals purchase and use goods and services and what motivates them to do so. Below, we will discuss how retail analytics tracks this behavior and how it translates into enhancing the customer experience for more sales conversions.
What do you need to know about your customers to enhance their experience?
To truly understand customer behavior, you need to be able to answer the following questions about your customers:
▶︎ To what demographic group do they belong?
▶︎ What kind of products appeal to them?
▶︎ What kind of marketing messages resonate with them?
▶︎ How do they like to navigate your store?
▶︎ How long are they willing to wait for service? (Not long!)
Luckily, retail analytics can answer all of these questions and provide you with insights into meeting your customers’ demands.
Here is a list of tactics for analyzing customer behavior and improving customer experience in your store.
Demographic Analysis
Demographic analysis as part of a retail analytics solution tells you the predominant age and gender of your customers. It can even recognize customers’ facial features for insight on how happy, angry or sad they might be. It enables retail store managers to segment their customers and create customer profiles for more effective targeted marketing initiatives. Consider that your customer base consists mostly of young adult females with children. With this insight, you have a better idea of the products and services they would want and need. You can then measure the effectiveness of targeted marketing campaigns to see if your customer segmentation is correct and how you can optimize future campaigns.
People Counting
People counter sensors register an accurate count of the number of customers entering your store, per minute, hour, day, week, month, or even year. You can also measure the sales conversion ratio by integrating your PoS (Point of Sales) system to see how many customers made purchases compared to the total number of customers in a period. With this information, you can predict when your customers are most likely to visit your store and prepare in advance with additional staff members on the floor, a fully stocked inventory, targeted marketing campaigns, and extra checkout counters.
Heatmap Analysis
Heatmap analysis shows how your customers navigate your store, where they stop to browse, which products they engage with, and which entrances and exits they prefer. This data gives retail managers insight into optimizing store layout and product placement for ultimate accessibility and customer satisfaction.
Queue Management
One universal trait among customers is that they hate standing in line or waiting for service. A queue management system monitors and detects people standing in queues and measures the amount of time they stand still or when they abandon the store. Retail managers can set up real-time alerts to be sent to staff members on the floor when queues grow or when queue time reaches a predetermined limit so they can open additional checkout counters to reduce queue times.
Data analytics
Sensor technology is only responsible for collecting customer data. When tracking behavior, you must learn what to do with the data. Data analytics software’s job is to present you how to view all the acquired information in context. It takes data and turns it into insights to help retail store owners make better and more informed decisions. For example, customer count data alone are just numbers. A data analytics platform visualizes that data in context, showing when your peak hours are, the recommended staff to customer ratio, how many sales conversions occur during those hours, and just about any other customizable KPI you can imagine.
Vemcount makes the process of tracking customer behavior easy. Our advanced people counter technology integrated with our powerful data analytics platform provides an intuitive and easy-to-use solution for optimizing your business processes and enhancing customer experience.
