Using Store Traffic Data and Customer Counting to improve your Bottom-line
Though e-commerce gets the flashy headlines, many brick-and-mortar locations from retail to grocery stores are stronger than ever. But while online stores are flush with traffic dashboards and solutions like Google Analytics, it can be a little more difficult to track your store traffic and learn about your shoppers at your physical location.
Still it is essential to understand as much as possible about those coming through your doors. With a little planning and some help from technology this is possible. Here are a few ways you can begin to learn about your store traffic, adjust to their behaviors, and improve both their experiences and your bottom-line.
Set goals - Whether you want to improve traffic counts, drive traffic to certain parts of your store, or improve conversion rates, it helps to first identify where you want to focus your efforts.
Track entries - Visitors have to come through your door before they can do anything, so capturing entry numbers is a great starting point to better understand patterns of your store’s traffic.
Monitor areas - Your store has different areas for different reasons, so having the ability to capture where your traffic is moving through your store and how long they’re spending there helps you identify how well those areas, products, or displays are performing.
Examine behavior - Identifying different trends of your store traffic like whether they turn left or right upon entering, how long they stand in front of displays, line wait times, and others can go a long way to helping you improve the design and layout of your space to improve its performance.
Run tests - With the ability to track and learn from your store traffic, you can make the most of testing new marketing and messages, designs and displays, layouts and enhancements, and anything else you can think of to both bring more traffic in and increase conversions.
Compare to POS - Your business needs to make money, and continuously monitoring how your store traffic is affecting your bottom-line is essential. With the data you’re collecting and tests you’re running, compare everything to your revenue to identify trends, improvements, and new changes you can make.
For brick-and-mortar shops, foot traffic is king, so the more data you can capture about your foot traffic the better. And whether you go with a simple beam counter or more advanced cameras or floor sensors, people counting technology can go a long way to delivering the insights you need to boost your bottom-line.