How Location Analytics will revolutionize the Retail industry

Location analytics: An unanswered technical solution for retailers. Businesses are now incarcerating huge amount of data with the goal of giving their customers the best experience, they will deliver information, services, and products based on your earlier preferences. That’s the benefit of big data and business analytics.

Let us face it, no matter what the industry is we all agree to one point that customer is the center of all the businesses and this is absolutely not new.

Retail industries have taken a new approach towards their customers and i.e. personalization, using all the data to personalize in-person experience inside the store. As retailers have started focusing on customers with smartphones that include almost everybody, the wall between the “online retail vs. physical retail” collapses

Consequently, three radical transformations have taken place:

• Higher Expectations: Expectation raises every time a customer has a new or better buying experience, with each raising bar retailer has to come up with something to hold on to their customers because a customer with higher expectation is more likely to shift to other competitors for a better experience
• At last, the war between online and offline seems to be over and nobody came out a winner, Physical stores have their own benefits with no comparison with an online store and vice versa
• Personalized stores are coming, and finally, the store staff would know who is coming to their store before he/she buys anything. Just like online store one might have to fill up form and login before buying anything

The key to this idea of personalization is the location analytics, applied worldwide for numerous decision making, Few of such examples are:

• Specialty retailers use video analytics to study their customer trails and actions helping them design their store accordingly
• Big retailers have even designed an app to navigate their customers inside the store helping them locate what they looking for
• Mall operators use network to study and track the shopping pattern

Who is using Location Analytics?

Source: esri.com

According to one of the recent surveys more than half of the retail stores expect to install wifi in their stores showing their interest in location analytics to support their marketing decisions. Here are few ways that retailers can employ location analytics to personalize their stores:

1. Assess the performance of all the areas individually: Being connected with the customers you get to know where, when and how they go through your store. Retailers can assess the productivity of a sales area eradicating or changing the location of the inefficient areas. For example, if you found out through your analytics that most of the visitors coming to your stores are students of the age group 18-25 you might not want to keep kids related stuff in front. Even the things kept on the top shelf or bottom shelf have different attractiveness index. If planned well our conversion rates and time spent might increase

2. Personalizing the experience of shopping: Intensifying the level of customization will be the key to your profit. As soon as the customer enter the store they have two questions in their mind and that is, the product availability, if available where they can locate it. These answers can lead to a better assistance and proper offers if they are using their mobile to locate the product. Your repeat customer might help you customize it properly building a brand awareness and credibility among others

3. Navigation control: Create a shopper-friendly environment inside similar to navigation in the e-commerce website. If a shopper knows where he/she needs to go as soon as they enter they will visit often. When you know your customer’s location inside the store, you can make offers accordingly resulting in a bigger basket size.

4. Nothing stays for long even your customized patterns in the store need to change frequently, testing the potency of the arrangement to increase sales and visibility among your competitors. With the use of location analytics, an optimal pattern can be achieved by observing the flow of the customer.

The advantage of this kind of location tracking is massive. Store owners can easily build data on calculating length of their visit, their duration, their engagement, overall number of customers, their movement in the store, it’s better if they are using store’s wifi service for a real time assistance, special discounts and offers or if they have an existing account associated with their device.

If you would like to find out how location analytics can help your business, get in touch for a quick consultation call.