Businesses today need to be more agile and efficient than ever before in order to retain a leading edge over their competitors. Incorporating smart technology and strategies for collecting and analyzing the most important data in your business is one way to transform everyday metrics into actionable insights that drive sales and improve the customer experience.
One such smart technology that is helping companies to do this is footfall counting. It may seem like a simple metric to track, but the benefits and opportunities that can be derived from this technology are abounding.
Let’s take a deeper look at what footfall counting is and how it can help your business stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
👣 How to count footfall: understand the technology behind the sensors counters
Although the term ‘footfall counting’ seems self-explanatory, it involves advanced technology and data analytics that does far more than simply counting feet. Footfall counting devices are being used to drive business optimization and customer experience strategies in retail stores, shopping malls, airports, nightclubs, event centers, and even public libraries and museums, among many other places.
Sometimes referred to as people counting, customer counting, traffic counting, or visitor counting, footfall counting is the process of tracking the number of humans in an area and analyzing behavioral and movement patterns in context.
A footfall counting device is an electronic sensor that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to track every time a person enters or exits your space in real-time. It can also show how long they dwell in certain areas, and by integrating the appropriate analytical software, it measures conversion rates when customers make a purchase.
By combining footfall counting data with your POS data, you get even more data-driven insight into your customers’ behavior and the performance of your business.
👣 How footfall counting is used in different businesses sectors
Many industries use footfall counting to track and count people in different contexts and for different reasons. One of the main factors driving the growth of footfall counting technology is the COVID-19 pandemic and the related safety requirements to prevent the spread of the virus. Social distancing aside, footfall counting is also used to improve customer satisfaction, boost conversions and optimize business operations and processes.
👣 Footfall counting for Retailers & Shopping Malls
Retail Stores and Shopping Malls primarily use footfall counting to better understand their customers and to measure how well they are performing when footfall data is integrated into data analytics systems. Analyzing footfall counting data in combination with other retail data enables retailers to measure several key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion rate, visitor traffic count, staff scheduling, pedestrian foot traffic, dwell time, walk-in rate, shopper to staff ratio, and in-store visitor flow. Footfall counting sensors can also be leveraged to manage queues effectively in a physical location. This helps retail stores reduce wait times and cart abandonment rates and increase conversion rates and profitability. Further to this, retailers and shopping malls will better understand if their activities and efforts for their business have a positive return in terms of marketing investment and how changes in layout or product placement may change visitor behavior.
👣 Footfall Counting for Airports & Stations
Airports and other Transport Stations are notoriously busy areas that require effective footfall counting to optimize traffic flows, queue management, building layout, staffing levels, transport schedules, and boarding gate allocations. By identifying which pathways are the most frequented, which areas are underused, and where there may be issues like crowding, footfall counters help airports and transport stations run more efficiently.
👣 Footfall Counting for Public Areas & Institutions
With rising concerns for safety in public spaces, footfall counters can prevent overcrowding and monitor health and safety mandates like social distancing and occupancy levels. Footfall counters can also be used for staff optimization according to the number of visitors measured in real-time and identified patterns of heavy traffic over time. From a city’s most popular attraction to what happens in case of an emergency, footfall counting enables Municipal authorities to make quick and well-informed decisions. You can also get an understanding of how different events and activities influence the number of visitors in the city by comparing traffic data from different time periods.
👣 A Footfall Counting solution for you
Vemcountis a comprehensive data analytics solution that includes the information from the footfall counters to help businesses optimize their business processes, customer experience, and ROI. With Vemcount, you have access to the following footfall counting features:
▶︎ Customer Flow: Find out how many people visit and leave a location with up to 98% accuracy and which entrances/exits are used more/less.
▶︎ Peak Times: Identify peak times during the day, month or year and optimize your business operations.
▶︎ Benchmark Locations: Compare and rank your locations based on performance through hourly or daily updated top/bottom lists.
▶︎ Conversion Rate: Integrate Vemcount with your POS system and get insights into how traffic converts into sales.
