Data is vital in any business. If you are trying to boost your store sales, the first step you can take is to try to become data-centric as retail is becoming more data-rich. Capturing the exact data that shed light on those metrics which is beneficial to you is the real challenge. Data plays an important role in boosting sales and increasing customer satisfaction. Yet most retailers have not yet noticed this and they are unaware of the unlimited possibilities of this hidden treasure in taking their business to the next level. The digitalization of the retail sector increases the data volume exponentially each year. For the retail industry data means not just the income and expense details, it contains vital information that helps to study customer behavior, purchasing pattern, staff allocation, peak sales time, inventory management, event or sale success rate, etc.
Let’s check from where you will get the data to analyze.
- Point Of Sale Systems
Many of the retailers misunderstood that the point of sale systems are only meant for billing purposes. The point of sale system is the right tool that can provide you with sales trends, customer purchase history, most sold and least sold item details, peak selling time and branch location, exchanged items details, promotions status, and many more metrics. The new age point of sale software like Retail Pro helps you to get valuable insight into your business. Real-time visual analytics helps you to understand everything more easily. By integrating the brick and mortar and ecommerce store you can see which item is selling more in both and can increase the stock according to that. Checking and updating the stock volume regularly will help you to gain some loyal customers. You can customize each report according to your business and you can schedule the timing of report distribution to the team. By organizing your retail sales data by hour, day, and week, or month, POS systems assist you in digging deeper into your data. With these POS data, you can send personalized emails to the customers depending upon their previous purchase history. So it’s high time to update to a modern POS solution that has magic in the reporting to boost sales.
2) Footfall data analytics from people counting systems
E-commerce stores have many ways to get traffic data in real-time. You may be using Google analytics, clean CART, Piwik, etc. Surprisingly, most retailers still don’t know that they can count their customers who visited their offline stores. The people counting systems provide you with the footfall traffic data, store heat map, etc. in detail. The footfall analytics reports showcase the area where the customers spend more time, according to these you can allocate labor in that particular area to assist them. People counting systems now comes with Artificial Intelligence. So using such kinds of systems will help you with more accurate data of the visitors and you can predict the traffic trend with that. The footfall traffic data contains the customer movement history inside the store. Fitting room, billing area, kids’ clothes sections, etc. can be rearranged according to these data analytics.
3) Data from Email Marketing tools
Email marketing is a common method of reaching out to customers online. There are many types of emails that a retailer used to send to the customers like remarketing emails, welcome emails, promotional emails, new arrivals emails, notification emails, etc. After sending the mails have you ever checked the open rates, bouncing rates, and unsubscribed lists? High open rates of course show that there is something very interesting to the customer. You can follow that strategy to stick your customers with your brand. Email marketing tools can generate reports on the email opened time, this can be used to schedule your next email. In the case of the Amazon ecommerce website, 29% of the total profit comes through recommendations and remarketing.
The traditional data collecting methods like surveys, giveaways, etc. will encourage your customers to provide their data. Each data is important for a business. According to the Google ZMOT research “Increasingly, consumers are making decisions well before the actual moment of in-store or online purchase. 88% of consumers research before they buy, consulting an average of 10.4 sources.” Use multiple channels to gather customer data. You can see the difference in sales.
