In today’s retail store market, if you are not keeping up with the competitors you can be left behind. In many cases this is based on learning retail store traffic trends and optimizing the dollars you are investing in both employees and marketing. Ensuring that you are using retail store traffic data and implementing it into your business model is not a “maybe I’ll do it” thing anymore, it has become a necessity.
By integrating retail traffic counter analytics into your POS, retailers will improve their conversion rates and sales revenue in the following ways:
- Measuring marketing efforts – Retailers often spend a lot of time and money on both in-house marketing efforts and third-party advertising groups. A retail traffic module could show how marketing dollars spent result in traffic changes, as well as how well those customers convert and make a purchase. This would allow retailers to focus their marketing and invest more into campaigns that not only bring in the most traffic, but traffic that converts into the most sales. A better ROI on marketing investment capital means that you are getting the most out of your advertising dollars.
- Optimizing store hours – Store hours are always a hot topic, be it during your slow season or during the holiday season. But what effect does changing store hours have on the actual store traffic? Retailers can use traffic data to measure whether longer hours translate into simply making the flow of customers stay the same but over a longer period– or if longer store hours yield increased revenue. Retail store owners can also see how traffic flow and conversion rates are affected by changes in hours.
- Aligning staffing to traffic – For many small retailers, staff schedules are assigned according to employees’ availability and shifts are created on what they “think” is best for the store. One of the best ways for retailers to improve revenue is to align employee schedules to when there are peaks and valleys in store traffic. Retailers can improve conversion rates by using customers-per-staff-hour numbers to find the perfect ratio of sales employees to customers. Retail store traffic counters will help optimize the amount of money you are spending on employee salary overhead.
- Visibility of traffic flow trends – Because retail business is highly seasonal and fluctuates on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, insight into the flow of traffic can help retailers learn more about short-term and long-term success of their stores. For example, if your retail store’s traffic flow falls every Wednesday evening for 12 weeks straight, retailers can investigate (maybe they’ll find a competitor running a promotion hat is taking traffic away from their store). Additionally, retailers can collect data to holistically compare season over season and year over year trends.
