Have you ever considered that your company’s main assets enter and leave your location each and every day? Each shopper that comes through the door has a sales value, whether or not they make a purchase during their visit. Whether your business is that of retail store or retail property management, shoppers are your main asset, and recognizing this fact is crucial.

So how do you gain more value from each and every shopper? You need to better understand who your shoppers are and how they behave. Shopper analytics allows you to understand who your shoppers are, where they go, and how long they stay in your location. These valuable insights allow you to optimize your merchandising, operations, staffing and marketing plans.

What if you could add multiple layers of intelligence to better understand shopper behavior as they relate to specific customer types? Shopper analytics allows retailers and shopping malls to triangulate different pieces of data to come up with actionable insights. Data elements by themselves are merely facts. Combining location- and loyalty-based analytics (dwell time and loyalty rates) with demographic information and sales trend metrics paints a much richer picture. Extracting more value from your shoppers is about combining different data points to build an insight-based story. According to Retail Wire, multiple metric-based insights can be combined to create a more complete picture of shopper behavior and intent:

• Sales Conversion Rate – The percentage of shoppers that made a purchase is essential to understanding store performance and having the correct merchandise that customers need and want.
• Shoppers to Staff Ratio – The number of shoppers per staff member available to wait on customers provides information to optimize staffing to convert shoppers into customers.
• Repeat Visitors – Understanding repeat shoppers and their behaviors can assist in merchandising, product offerings and categorizing repeat into “loyal”
• Shopper Path – Understanding where shoppers go once they arrive will assist with staffing, product and feature placement, and store layout .
• Dwell Time Metrics (Stops, Passes, Dwells) – Understanding the length of time shoppers spend in the stores or malls assists with staffing and shopper experience.
• Product Conversion – Illustrates how displays and features perform relative to each other based on buying patterns.

Analyzing shopper data within a store or shopping mall allows you to understand which in-store displays or property features have the greatest dwell time and overall traffic. Dwell time is a metric that measures the amount of time a shopper spends in your retail store or shopping mall. Getting shoppers through door can sometimes be an accomplishment in itself, so it is essential that you capitalize on each and every shopper who enters your property. (Remember, shoppers are assets.)

Retailers know that the longer a shopper stays in a store, the greater the average sales per transaction (AST) and the greater the sales conversion rate percentage. While you cannot overtly force shoppers to spend more time in your retail establishment, you can encourage them to spend additional time in your store by providing outstanding customer service and engaging displays.

Amp Up Customer Service

Having helpful and knowledgeable staff is a great motivation for shoppers to extend their visit to your store by a few minutes and ultimately return in the future. If staff are not available, integrating interactive content and displays into your retail environment maybe another option.

End Caps as Magnets for Center Store

Better understanding how end-cap displays and other features attract shoppers and how well they pull shoppers from high-traffic perimeter departments into center store aisles is key. Shopper analytics can enhance product placement decisions by providing dwell-time statistics for specific displays and departments. By analyzing this information and combining it with conversion metrics, a store can optimize its store planning and layout. The store’s staff have the data to conduct a before-and-after analysis that can compare conversion levels when end caps or features change. In addition, traffic metrics, the number of shopper stops, and dwell time can inform better timing and coordination with related media promotions and mobile app use in the store.

Real-Time Data Is Actionable

Within hours of making a display change, the operations team can analyze the shopper analytics data to determine if a display or feature change was effective, giving a comparison of the display’s performance within the retail establishment.

Do you wonder how different groups of shoppers are reacting to your merchandising? Shopper analytics offers detailed demographic data based on observational analysis that arm your teams with the powerful data to turn shoppers into assets. By pairing customer loyalty data with the age, gender, and ethnicity of your customers from video-based technology, you can get a complete shopper analysis profile to tailor your merchandising to your target audience. What’s more, you can determine where your most valuable customer groups go after they enter your establishment

A basic financial tenant of any business is return-on-assets (ROA). In this case, your shoppers are your assets. It is imperative that retail stores and retail property managers increase their shopper value, and thereby increase their figurative ROA. Pooling data from various sources – people counters, traffic metrics, in-store video – allows retailers and shopping malls to paint a complete picture of the customer’s behavior. In-store hardware, real-time predictive analytics, dashboarding, and other reporting systems all merge to draw maximum value from shoppers.