By Linda Bustos
Online retailers depend on the power of Web analytics to deeply understand customer behavior, track sales performance and analyze optimization efforts. Without them, marketers and merchandisers would be shooting blanks into cyberspace.
But what about in-store retail?
The new retail analytics, leveraging Wi-Fi, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), GPS geofencing and sensors that can read facial expressions and identify gender mirror many online metrics. And when looped back with web analytics, can drive powerful insights, marketing and optimization opportunities for cross-channel businesses.
In the April, 2014 report Analyze This: Web Style Analytics Enters The Retail Store, Forrester Research, Inc. outlines the key metrics: awareness and adoption, engagement, experience and impact, their Web equivalents, and why they matter.
While the new in-store analytics are useful, the holy grail of omnichannel commerce is integration with online and mobile analytics and applications. Fully integrated data offers the opportunity to, for example:
- Truly understanding research online/purchase offline (and vice-versa – showrooming) behavior
- Coming closer to a true 360-degree view of the customer
- Delivering more seamless experiences across channels (e.g. personalize products and offers via mobile based on in-store navigation)
- Augmenting personalization (e.g. making “people who tried on this dress ultimately bought” visible online)
- Compare geolocated store conversion rates to geolocated visitor conversion online
- Measure impact of email, social and mobile campaigns on in-store sales
Marketers have much to look forward to as this space evolves.
