If we’ve learned anything from e-commerce, it’s the value of data. It has given online retailers everything they need to know about their consumers. Until recently, however, physical retail stores have been data dark from the process of receiving goods through the point of sale. Your best customer could walk in and out of your store, and you wouldn’t know anything about them except that they made a purchase.
With connected pop-ups making waves at NRF 2018, we spoke with Ian Hutchinson, lead for pop-up store solutions at Samsung Electronics America, to learn more about why data is so valuable to brick-and-mortar retail.
Expanding Your ROI
When asked about the benefits of data to retail, Hutchinson said, “why wouldn’t you want to know?”
For store owners, data enables you to expand your return on investment. Traditionally, ROI is measured by how much money is in your cash register or the revenue on your sales report. However, data provides insight into in-store interactions and dwell time. This information enables you to design retail experiences for different consumers and gain knowledge into what parts of your store are the most popular.
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The long-term benefits are enormous since you’re not only learning more about what products to focus on, you’re also learning how to better cater to your customers and ultimately improve brand loyalty.
Getting Started
For retailers just starting to learn how to collect data, Hutchinson recommended beginning with understanding the footsteps of your consumer. Examine basic traffic inside and outside your store. Look at who walked by, who came in and what time of day it was — and then see if you can find correlations and relationships between these factors.
The next step would be to ask yourself if you know enough about your target demographic. Basic advertising dictates that brands should target their messaging toward specific demographics. A connected pop-up can inform you of what demographics are visiting your store and allow you to test and tweak messaging and merchandising to better engage your customers.
Connected pop-ups are the next frontier in retail innovation. These spaces can help you go beyond basic revenue and truly capture the loyalty of your customers through actionable data.
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