If you are anything like my aunt Tara, you started Christmas shopping on December 26th of last year. While most of us are not that diligent, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF), a growing number of consumers are beginning to start holiday shopping earlier every year.
Interestingly, even though online shopping has become a staple for most of us, we go out shopping more during the holidays to socialize and experience the sights and sounds of the season.
If you are in retail business anywhere in the world, you are certainly paying close attention to these trends and forecasts. And if your job is to make the in-store experience the best ever for the holidays, every piece of customer intelligence is critical for claiming your share of the billions being spent this year.
Let's take the guesswork out of tracking customer traffic.
To help customers better understand traffic patterns, we recently introduced retail analytics to our Aruba Central cloud services solution. This new capability is designed to give you real-time and historical insight into customers by looking at Wi-Fi statistics gathered from the smartphones that everyone carries today.
Since every person that walks by is a prospective customer, this is important information. You now have the ability to see how many actually entered the store, when during the day, and stayed for how long. And also share data with marketing and upper management.
Capturing this valuable data doesn't require you to install and manage additional hardware, and the shopper doesn't even need to be connected to the network. You leverage the same Aruba Wi-Fi and management tools that you run your business on. It's an excellent way to put your Wi-Fi to work for boosting business.
Make smarter business decisions to attract more shoppers.
Once you have the essential customer traffic data, recognizing patterns and finding opportunities to improve your business is easier.
By tracking passerby traffic you can easily increase in-store traffic by testing different storefront displays, signage, and campaign offers. Now marketing and sales have a better way to judge what provides the highest conversion from a passerby to an in-store visitor.
You can also track how long shoppers stay in the store. This can be used to improve shopper engagement by testing different store layouts and merchandising. Floor staffing can also be adjusted to ensure that shoppers are receiving the best in-store experience possible.
Not all stores are equal.
With Aruba Central, you can customize how you measure and calculate conversions based on what works best for you, whether you have 10 stores or 2000.
More importantly, you not only get great insight into how each individual store is performing but also how multiple stores compare against each other, which allows you to determine where and how to make your investments count the most.
Want to learn more? Check out this short demo video.
