How to Use In-Store Analytics to Drive Targeted Marketing

Marketing and advertising professionals are responsible for driving sales revenue and enhancing visitor satisfaction. To improve the customer experience and drive more sales, retailers often strive to have more visibility into customer behaviors. In order to do that, they need accurate customer demographic insights and data-driven strategies to optimize the visitor experience.

Video analytics platforms can be used to gather crucial business intelligence regarding visitor footfall and demographic patterns, so that marketing and advertising professionals can improve the shopper experience, use space more efficiently, and optimize the property layout in ways that benefit marketers and – ultimately – guests and customers.

Uncover Demographic Intelligence in Video

Video analytics should be used by retailers to gather accurate demographic statistics, such as, what percentage of customers are male versus female, or adults versus children? Analyzing this information can help marketers and advertisers build effective, targeted campaigns for audiences that already visit the store, as well as attract new visitors.

Whether managing one property or several stores, marketing and advertising professionals can analyze the demographic data at each location or across multiple sites. These demographic insights can help determine the most effective marketing and advertising strategies to reach target audiences, assess the success of marketing and advertising campaigns, and identify new potential audiences.

Say a big box retailer with hundreds of sites across the country adds video analytics to their toolbox of audience segmentation and analysis. In doing so, they discover that a much higher percentage of men are visiting their stores than they had thought in the northeast region. With those insights, they can then create a thoughtful campaign targeted towards men in that area. Or conversely, work to understand why more men aren’t visiting their stores in other areas and create campaigns based on their findings.

Quantifiable, actionable business intelligence guides marketing and advertising professionals’ decisions about which messages and products are most relevant for their visitors and where to spend marketing and advertising dollars to maximize their return on investment.

Track Footfall to Drive Visitor Experience

Marketing and advertising professionals can use video analysis platforms to aggregate video data to track onsite foot traffic volume, show navigational shopper patterns via visual heatmaps, and average customer dwell times as well as unique, bounce, and return visits to specific locations.

Using that data, retailers can assess whether in-store hotspots due to are popular items or displays, or traffic bottlenecks. This business intelligence can not only help the store optimize site layout so that traffic flows easily, but it is invaluable for making data-driven decisions about where to place advertisements and displays to enhance customer experiences and encourage return visits to the store.

Additionally, insights like people-count reports can indicate the average number of people in a checkout counter queue on certain days of the week, certain holidays, or time of day. This information can help marketing and advertising professionals make critical decisions about when to launch or refresh campaigns.

Build Brand Loyalty through Enhanced Experiences

The in-store experience has a strong influence on customer loyalty and retention and, therefore, in-store analytics are critical for managing personalized and enhanced experiences. From crowd and queue management – enabled by real-time people-count alerting and dashboards for uncovering trends – as well as visibility into sales associate activity and engagement, marketers can better understand the in-store experience and optimize it through data-driven strategies.

Data from people-count reports can be correlated with point-of-sale systems and sales data to identify in-store shopping cart abandonment. By translating video metadata into business intelligence dashboards and visualizations, marketers and advertisers can work to understand the cause for abandonment and work to counteract that with targeted in-store displays and campaigns.

Analyzing unique, return and bounced visit rates can help marketers understand what displays and advertisements draw interest, encourage a customer to enter the store and – through correlating visitor statistics with point of sale data – ultimately drive conversions.