Big data and data analytics are shaping the future and transforming aspects of every business and industry. The retail industry is one of the most impacted sectors in the globe when  it comes to digital transformation and automation.

 

You may have heard of the importance of retail analytics and the way it affects the retail industry and its role in making better decisions to enhance the business performance relying on real, accurate data. 

 

So what is retail analytics and how can retailers use retail analytics to their own benefit in improving business performance and increasing sales? This you will discover in this article. 

 

Retail Analytics in the world of data

Retail data analytics can be defined as the process of providing analytical data and insights on inventory level, sales, customers, supply chain movement, and other aspects that are fatal for the business since these data help in making the right marketing and business decisions to optimise the performance of the retail store. 

 

Retail data analytics also provide data about the demographic and behaviour of the ideal customer using data mining and data discovery. 

 

Using retail data analytics will help in making better choices and decisions to run the business more efficiently and deliver a better experience to the customers. 

 

It will also help businesses to predict the customers and business needs which will affect the performance of the retail store. 

 

How can retailers use retail analytics?

There are many usages of retail analytics, retail analytics and data can affect the business from different aspects, here are some benefits of retail analytics: 

  • Optimising the inventory and procurement.

With retail data analytics, you will have a better understanding of the inventory and procurement and its level, thus you can mentor and track your inventory to make better decisions that will optimise your store. 

  • Identifying customer trends

Retail data analytics of your customers will enable you to track the trends, behaviour, and needs of your customers which will affect in increasing the effectiveness of targeting your audience. 

  • Improving the marketing campaigns

When you have data and analytics of your store, you can track your customers and the performance of your campaigns which will lead to optimising the performance of your coming marketing campaigns depending on past analytics. 

  • Creating relevant customer experiences

When you mentor and track customers in your store, you will understand your customers’ behaviour which you will depend on to improve the customer experience inside your store. 

  • Understanding the customers’ behaviour

Retail analytics will enable you to understand your customer behaviour from the collected data and you can use this data to optimise your store performance around your customers. 

  • Optimising in-store operations

Retail analytics will give you a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t and ensure the balance with demands. 

  • Predicting spending

Data will provide you with information to understand the purchase history of customers and this will help in predicting the spending of customers in the future.

 

  • Understanding customer journey 

Analytics will answer many questions related to customers and their journey inside the store and this will help in optimising the customer experience inside the store. 

 

Why is retail analytics so important?  

Every retail business or store needs to be able to target and predict customers’ needs to offer the right products that meet their needs at the right price at the right time. 

 

Achieving so means that you are in need of analytics to understand your customers and that is what retail analytics will help you with. 

 

With retail analytics, you can level up your store and optimise the performance of your retail store and make better marketing and business decisions that will improve your store. 

 

Types of retail analytics:

Using retail analytics leverage the store performance since retailers can meet customers in the right place with the right product. 

 

You can track visitors with a footfall counter inside your store and this tracking will help you to understand your visitors and the conversion rate in order to optimise this conversion rate by making good use of data and retail analytics. 

  • In-store analytics

in-store analytics means getting key metrics regarding foot traffic, dwell time, conversion rate, and other metrics. Gathering data from in-store technologies will help in uncovering the real story behind what is happening in your store and customers behaviour. 

 

Making good use of this data will help you to follow the right trends in your industry, improve other areas, and make data-driven decisions to increase the productivity of your store and staff in addition to optimising the store performance. 

 

To collect this valuable data, you need to use in-store technologies such as heatmaps and people counters. These solutions will help in mentoring and tracking the visitors’ activities in your store in order to use them later to optimise the store performance. 

  • Customer analytics

Understanding customers’ behaviour inside your store will enable you to create a better experience around your customers and improve your relationship with them. 

 

Getting this knowledge of your customers and their behaviour inside your store means that you need to  track the POS and other solutions to collect data. 

 

Combining this data with other data collected from different resources will enable you to understand customers in order to optimise the sales performance inside your store. 

  • Merchandise attribute analytics

With this kind of retail analytics, you will understand what type of products your customer prefers. To know such information, you need to check what analytics say of your products and what the customers consume. 

 

You have to know the description of the products including colour, fabric, size, and many others. The consumption of the products with an understanding of this description will inform you what your customers prefer. 

  • Inventory analytics

Inventory analytics is your way to balanced inventory. It will help you to track the performance of the inventory to avoid any product surplus which may affect the workflow in your store. 

 

With predictive analytics, stores can mentor the market demands and adjust inventories to meet the customers’ needs. Thus, retailers will be able to reduce unnecessary stocks and prevent stock-outs from occurring. 

 

Retail Analytics techniques

Tracking the performance of the store used to be a hard task but thanks to retail analytics for providing different solutions that help sales and marketing managers to track different aspects of store performance in order to use it for future campaigns and make better decisions to improve the performance of the retail business. 

 

Here are some of the retail analytics techniques that you must use: 

  • People counter 

With the people counter or footfall counter, you will measure and track the foot traffic inside your store which will help in optimising the performance of your retail business and make better decisions. 

  • Zone analytics ( heatmaps )

Zone analytics will help you understand the customer behaviour inside your store and this will lead to understanding the customer’s journey. 

  • Queue analysis

You can with queue analysis monitor the queues and the time your visitors spend in the queues and this will help you to provide a better experience to the visitors. 

  • Demographic analysis

Using demographic analysis will help you to segment your customers according to their characteristics. It also enables you to have a deep image of the customers needs which will affect the targeting and marketing results. 

  • The business intelligence platform

The platform business intelligence will help you understand the data that is collected through different technologies in order to be used in making better decisions that improve and develop your retail business.