In the digital world, it is easy to track the progress of your marketing efforts and customer behaviour inside your website or any marketing channel. 

 

These digital channels provide different metrics to keep an eye on and track the customer journey. Still, it gets more difficult when it comes to measuring customer behaviour inside your store.

 

Thanks to big data that enables you to track the marketing efforts, understand customer behaviour and make the right decision depending on data through using technologies that will provide you with insightful data about your customers inside your retail business. 

 

Here is a list of the best 3 technologies that provide retail analytics and data about the foot traffic of your customers. 

 

What is retail analytics? 

Retail analytics is all about providing analytical data and insights related to sales, customers, inventory, and many other aspects that play a significant role in making better marketing and business decisions. 

 

Retail data analytics allow retailers to get more insights into the performance of the store, products, and customers which will help in growing the business. 

 

What are the types of retail analytics? 

Retail analytics have four types and each one of them has a vital role in providing insights. 

  • Descriptive Analytics

It is considered the most common type of data analytics and it helps retailers in organizing their raw data from different resources to answer their questions about what is happening in their business. 

 

Analysts used to work on this type of analytics manually through the traditional method using excel and formatting it to show the data in charts. However, there is no need to do so manually anymore. 

  • Diagnostic Analytics

This type of analytics answers the “why” of the business problems by using the same raw data to get deeper into data in order to find a correlation between the data. 

 

This kind of analysis used to be done manually but it is kind of hard nowadays with this amount of data and there is a need of using machine learning and AI to do so. 

  • Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is concerned with answering “what is next”. Depending on the findings of the descriptive and diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics forecast the future and what is going to happen. 

 

Some retail businesses try to do this type of analytics manually but it is very complex to do this using the basic resources and methods since there are many correlations between the factors of the retail industry. 

  • Prescriptive Analytics

This is the final type of analytics and the most advanced one. Regardless of the previous types of retail analytics, prescriptive analytics tells you what to do in order to optimize the performance of the business and get the best results. 

 

There are different approaches that can be used in prescriptive analytics such as running simulations, using algorithmic AI and identifying patterns through teaching a machine learning program. 

 

The importance of retail analytics

 

Retail analytics provide you with solutions that will help you to accurately target and anticipate customers’ needs. This will help in making better marketing decisions that will affect the performance of your retail business. 

 

The best 5 technologies that you need to measure your customer behaviour in the retail industry.

 

As an operation manager or marketing manager of a retail store, you always seek to have a better understanding of your customers and improve the performance of the store and marketing campaigns. 

 

Hence, you are in need of measuring customer behaviour to optimize the performance of your store depending on real data. 

 

With customer behaviour tracking and analytics solutions, you can track and analyze the customers’ behaviour inside and outside your store. These analytics solutions will enable you to predict the desired products, set up the store the way they like, and measure your marketing campaigns. 

 

1- people counter 

No matter its various naming, people counting solutions help retailers to measure foot traffic and count the number of people inside and outside their retail store. 

 

With this data about your customers and visitors, you can have a deep understanding of customer behaviour and measure the marketing campaigns by tracking the conversion rates so you can make better decisions to optimize the performance of your marketing campaigns. 

 

The people counting system works by placing the sensors in strategic positions to count the visitors inside and outside the retail store, with this collected data, you can check it through the system to be used in optimizing the performance of the retail store. 

 

what to consider when choosing people counting solutions

a guide to people counting technology

 

2- zone analytics ( heatmaps ) 

In the digital world, you can track the customer’s journey easily through the analytics that you can have through different solutions in order to target your audience perfectly and increase the conversion rate.

 

However, this tracking of customers used to be hard to measure in the store but with zone analytics of heatmaps, you can track the customers journey in the store. 

 

Zone analytics solutions help retailers to get updates on customers journeys and from one department to another in the store. 

 

With zone analytics solutions, retailers will have a better understanding of the customers’ locations as if you are tracking them through a website using google analytics or any other solution in order to create strategies to optimize the marketing strategies. 

 

In addition, zone analytics will help you manage the staff depending on the data that you gain through the solution in order to provide a better experience for the customers. 

 

3- Queue analysis 

There is no doubt that no one likes to wait in queues. Queues analytics is considered one of the best solutions that retailers must have in order to optimize the performance of the store and increase customer loyalty. 

 

From now on, you have to start using a queue management system since queues affect sales, customer behaviour, and brand loyalty. 

 

Queues analysis enables retailers to monitor the queues and alerts them when they become long so retailers can minimize the time that visitors spend waiting in the queues which affects the customers experience and that will lead to increased sales and brand loyalty.

 

With queues analytics, you will understand the customers experience and improve the flow of your visitors in order to optimize their experience. 

 

4- demographic analysis

As a retail store, you are always in need of understanding your customers to deliver a personalized experience and attract new customers. To provide a personalized experience, you need to understand your customers’ demographics and that is what demographic analysis does. 

 

The demographic analysis will help you to categorize different segments of your customers according to different characteristics. This will enable you to have a deep image of the customers needs and wants so that you can target them in the best way and build marketing strategies around them and their needs to optimize your marketing results and customers experience. 

 

Using demographic analysis will help you to offer personalized products, target new customers, build your brand image, and improve your marketing strategies.  

 

5- The business intelligence platform

Retail analytics depend on data to help retailers optimize the store performance but there are no benefits of data if it is hard to be understood. 

 

The business intelligence platform is the solution that you need to understand data and make better decisions. It is a reporting platform that helps store managers understand the data of customers easily through reports. 

 

For example, if the queue management system shows that you have gained a 30% increase in sales, the business intelligence system will show you the reasons that caused these results.