To keep pace with today’s consumers’ demand for seamless, and engaging in-store experiences, brick-and-mortar retailers are harnessing the power of retail analytics tools like footfall counters, audience measurement, and queue management, as well as comprehensive retail analytics software. This allows them to gather customer data, meet these expectations, make better informed decisions, and enhance the in-store customer journey.
Scott Matthews, Head of Retail Analytics at Moving Tactics, the leading digital signage solutions company in South Africa, says, “With the advancement of retail analytics technologies, brick-and-mortar retailers are able to take advantage of top retail analytics tools to make data-driven decisions”. These tools include:
Footfall Counters, also known as people counting technologies, utilise specialised sensors and provide key information to retailers by passively tracking the number of people entering and leaving the store. By leveraging these insights, retailers can enhance customer service by adjusting staffing levels during peak traffic times, improve operational efficiencies with better forecasting, quantify sales based on traffic flow at certain times of the day or month, measure marketing initiatives based on actual feet through the door; and identify trends. Additionally, zonal tracking offers retailers data on window conversions, passing traffic, new vs returning shoppers, and average dwell times.
Audience Measurement provides retailers with measurable data so that they can better understand their in-store audience. Using cameras attached to digital signage screens, this discreet feature measures how customers interact with screen content. It gathers data on the number of viewers as well as their gender and age, and can also measure attention time, opportunities to view the content, and customer emotion at the time of viewing. Additionally, audience measurement can be tracked by store or network, by different times of the day or month, ensuring detailed results while maintaining customer privacy (PoPIA Compliant).
Queue Management provides retailers with a way to better manage their customers’ in-store experience while they wait for service by replacing traditional waiting lines with virtual ones. Customers can select a service, receive a number in the queue, maintain their place in the queue without standing in a line, and get notified when it’s their turn for service. Not only does this reduce the amount of time customers actually spend waiting but it also reduces the perceived waiting time. Most beneficially, it gives customers’ the opportunity to continue shopping while they wait and, in doing so, increases their basket size.
Moving Tactics Retail Analytics Solutions uses one or more of these retail analytics tools to provide accurate and expansive insights to leading brick-and-mortar retailers. These tools are then integrated with Sensmi, an in-store data analytics platform that gathers and analyses real-time data from multiple sources and transforms it into valuable insights via an easy-to-navigate comprehensive dashboard and reporting engine. As the official reseller of Sensmi in Southern Africa, Moving Tactics Retail Analytics Solutions is closing the gap between online and brick-and-mortar retailers.
By collecting and analysing similar data to that which web technologies use – but in a brick-and-mortar store – this integration enables retailers to measure the performance of a retail section via metrics such as traffic, opportunities to see, convergence, and dwell time. By leveraging these customer insights, retailers can craft the kinds of in-store experiences their customers want, optimise store layouts and operations, target their marketing initiatives more effectively, and enhance the in-store customer journey, all while driving sales.
To find out more about Moving Tactics’ Retail Analytics Solutions, visit: https://movingtactics.co.za/retail-analytics/.