Whether you own a small retail store or manage a large shopping centre, the accurate and valuable insights provided by people counting systems will help you to make smart business decisions. Owning a retail store has probably made you wonder about the following questions: Why do people come into my store? How long do people stay in my store? What routes do they walk en what do they end up buying? Accurate and high-quality footfall data helps you to understand customer behaviour and you can use this information to enhance the in-store shopping experience. It’s all about combining and applying qualitative (social behaviour) and quantitative (visitor numbers) customer data in and around physical stores, commercial areas and shopping malls.
Valuable insights help you understand your business
People counting technology has evolved a lot. Collecting valuable customer data is done with advanced counting devices. The retail environment is extremely competitive. In order to stay relevant and profitable as a retail location it is so important to understand your business and work with high quality, reliable data about your customers.
Footfall data will give a clear picture of how your business is performing and where there is room for improvement. Once the data is collected it is important to combine, interpret and analyse the data in the correct way to provide useful insights about future strategic and operations decisions. As a retail store owner, you will be able to make better informed decisions on growing your business and staying ahead of the competition. Counting people in retail can therefore help your business turn visitors into buying customers by:
- Optimising sales and conversions: by using people counting technology you can measure both the conversion rate and lost sales opportunities. The data provided will give you a clear idea of how many people visited your store and how many sales were actually completed. Traffic is the real potential of a store or shopping centre. Analysing customer flows can help in deciding where to strategically place certain items to reach more sales. Once people have started spending money in your store, chances are higher they will return and spend more. Now we’re talking business.
- Evaluating marketing campaigns: let’s say your brand recently launched an extensive marketing campaign. You’ll be able to evaluate and quantify the impact of marketing campaign more specifically based on store footfall, number of new customers created, visit frequency of customers, and sales conversion rate.
- Boosting in-store actions: as for all retail businesses it is crucial to strive for constant improvements in your daily business. People counting technology is therefore especially meant for improving in-store operations like improving staff planning, design, restocking and deciding on opening hours. As opposed to online businesses, physical stores make it possible to give the sales process a personal touch. So make sure you have the right data to actually make it personal. This means having the right amount of staff in the store to drive your customers and keep them not only happy, but also coming back.
An easy and effective way to count customers
Tracking footfall and people movement over a longer period of time will have a big impact on your customer knowledge and provides insights and input for smart business decisions. Maybe you should ask yourself the following: can your retail business really afford not to be involved in people counting?