The Opportunities in Your Data
You’ve collected and stored all that information. Now it’s time to use it.
One of the great advantages of having an online store is the customer data that can be generated.
In addition to demographics, online reporting can provide insights regarding seasonality, product trends, and customer behavior.
Data Analytics are important and should be applied to every aspect of business to get the most out of the data you collect. Retail Pro collects data from your POS and unifies it with your online data in one view for a complete picture. Customer analytics takes the transactional data collected and crunches those numbers to help make sales, marketing, and product development decisions.
But while many e-commerce retailers use that information to improve customer experience, ironically, online sales data can also be used to help determine where physical stores would thrive.
Retailers are discovering opportunities to open brick and mortar stores in new markets based on data gathered during the past two years of focus on e-commerce.
Customer profiles informing locations
Sales reports are chockful of information about markets that have driven online sales, which hints at the possibility of opening physical stores in those locations.
Online retailers use sales data to assess their performance and predict future trends, as well as understand their customers.
Because of their familiarity with data analytics, using customer data for real estate site selection is unsurprising. Familiar retail brands, including Madison Reed, UntuckIt, and Casper are following the lead of retailers such as Warby Parker and Amazon and opening physical locations.
But there’s more to this science than mapping sites to areas with the most customers. Retailers also need lifestyle information, which is easily determined by their purchase histories.
Once the best customers are identified, businesses can use those profiles to identify where similar consumers live and shop.
The value of each potential customer can be determined for any potential store location.
Creating separate customer profiles for your online and brick-and-mortar customers helps to identify differences in the types of customers each channel attracts. In addition, it will also help determine how many customers in a potential location are likely to shop online versus in-store.
OptCulture for Retail Pro gives you omnichannel abilities in your marketing operations so you can understand the data behind both online and in-store transactions. It also gives you the ability to reach customers wherever their preferred touchpoint is: mobile app, text messages, push notifications, emails or digital receipts.
Future of brick & mortar in omnichannel landscape
Pre-pandemic, retailers were focused on improving eCommerce.
Those ahead of the curve and with physical stores were enhancing their buy online, pickup in-store (“BOPIS”) offerings. Few offered curbside pickup.
Fast forward two years and every retailer – from Main Street USA to the global conglomerates — have changed the way they do business to reduce customer friction.
Omnichannel operations are now necessary to keep up with the fast-changing retail landscape, and Retail Pro Prism makes it easy to achieve and customize the way your business does omnichannel.
Today’s retailers are focused on gathering and analyzing customer data to offer products and services customers want, whether that’s online, in a convenient nearby physical location, or using a combination of both.
Curbside pickup has become an extremely popular method that is unlikely to disappear, and Retail Pro has mobile POS options available on Windows, Apple and Android devices that make it even easier to provide flexibility to shoppers.
In so doing, they’ve blurred the lines between where online retail stops and where in-person shopping begins.
The journeys have converged, and brick and mortar stores have arisen like a Phoenix to become an attractive growth channel.
