As online shopping continues to gobble up larger and larger portions of shopper activity,
brick-and-mortar stores are forced to find new ways to remain relevant. Retail analytics is the key for physical stores to stay competitive with the online space. To be more precise, retail analytics from guest WiFi can help narrow the experience gap between online and brick-and-mortar shopping.
What Is Retail Analytics?
Retail analytics is the act of gaining customer insights with the goal of improving one’s business. Retail analytics provides businesses with the capability to gather customer-related data to better understand their shoppers. Retail analytic data typically includes foot traffic, product purchases, and store promotions to name a few. This information tells business owners how customers move through their space and how they react to certain signage, promotions, or new products. This makes retail analytics critical to effective marketing for brick-and-mortar businesses. Knowing who your customers are and what they expect from your store helps create marketing resources that resonate and influence both current and potential shoppers.
By gathering customer data and figuring out what customers expect in order to keep them coming back, you can finally stay competitive with purely-online retailers.
Why Do We Need Retail Analytics?
Retail analytics has gained incredible visibility over the past few years. According to a private research firm, MarketsandMarkets, the analytics solutions market will be valued at about $5.1 billion by the end of 2020. This is due to the promising returns that enterprises are receiving from using some type of retail analytic platform. Some of the biggest retail chains such as Walmart have begun using a retail analytic platform in order to combat the growing trend of shopping at pure-online businesses such as Amazon.
WiFi Analytics: the Future of Retail Analytics
Customers expect complimentary WiFi in brick-and-mortar locations. And it’s a good idea to give it to them. Guest WiFi can help you to gather customer-insights through a consistent and reliable resource —  a WiFi signal. When a device connects to a WiFi network with WiFi analytics capabilities, that network will be able to track every movement (through a heat map) associated with that device. The result? Accurate and in-depth reports of the foot traffic of one’s stores. While these heat maps are a great resource for understanding your customers, it doesn’t have to stop there when it comes to WiFi retail analytics.
WiFi Analytics Paired with Smart WiFi
Basic retail analytic platforms gather customer-insights through only one type of resource (i.e. POS systems, discounts and promotions, customer surveys, etc.). WiFi retail analytics through a Smart WiFi Platform has the ability to gather customer-data through all of these methods and more. When you provide customers with a Smart WiFi network to connect to, you provide them with a multitude of ways to interact with your brand.
Through a WiFi captive portal, social information such as phone numbers, emails, and social media accounts become the resource for logging into a public WiFi network, and that data is stored in your Smart WiFi dashboard. This social information helps businesses understand their customers’ behaviors and preferences in ways they couldn’t before. Customers that prefer to provide an email to sign into WiFi is a sign that email marketing could be an important tactic to drive revenue. Customers that prefer using a social media account means that stronger social media marketing and advertising could be in your future to better engage with shoppers. No matter what your customers’ preferences are, WiFi analytics through Smart WiFi is your tool for strengthening your customer engagement.
Ready to implement retail analytics for your brick-and-mortar venue? With GoZone WiFi’s Analytics4WiFi Platform, you can see how visitors interact with your space and interpret traffic data to strategically improve business operations.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you better understand and interact with your customers.
