Using the Data From People Counters to Boost Service
If your business got off on the wrong foot, perhaps it’s time to count your footfall.
Having the ability to accurately measure your footfall gives you a nice overview of how effective your business is functioning. (See here for more information on how to effectively gather footfall rates here.)
Let’s see what kind of questions footfall analytics can answer for you.
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Conversions and lost sales opportunities
“How many visitors am I getting?”
One of the core benefits of people-counting tools is gaining information about the exact number exactly how many people are coming through your doors. This is a key metric to look at in order to optimize the performance and success of your business.
Knowing how many visitors are there in your store at any given time gives you the chance to capitalize on revenue opportunities.
People-counting devices placed at strategic points in a business location can be used to collect valuable customer data. This data gives managers a good overview of how their store is performing, how employees are coping, and which areas need improvement.
“How many visitors converted into paying customers?”
You need to know not only your sales volumes but also how many customers generated those numbers. Comparing the data gives you a pretty good estimate of how many visitors converted into paying customers and how many sales opportunities were lost.
If there is a big discrepancy, managers can take steps to investigate the reasons of poor conversion and high purchase abandonment rates. Is it because of poor service location layout? Is it because of long checkout lines? Perhaps poor customer service caused visitors to balk?
Having a people counter allows you to counter attack any hiccups in the service flow.
(Get it? “Counter”? Anybody? Ok, then.)
“How do my locations compare?”
A unified people-counting system can not only give you a nice overview of how a particular location of yours if performing, but help you compare different locations.
In turn, you can investigate what it is that gives one location an edge over the other. Perform bench-marking by finding out what’s working well in a particular location and using it to boost performance of other locations.
What’s more, footfall counters track accurate real-time data over a period of time. This allows you to compare visitor data from yesterday, last week or last year as well as pinpoint the highest revenue-producing hours.
Manage your staff accordingly
“What are my location’s peak hours?”
People-counting tools can make your day — literally — by helping you optimize the peak hours of your business. You can detect particular periods and areas of high activity to then properly plan out your staffing and take the most out of these sales opportunities.
For example, let’s say your store is open from 8am to 10pm, and has been for quite some time. If the data gathered from people counters shows that it is only from 9-10am that visitors start flooding in, this does suggest that later opening hours are more beneficial.
Moreover, if peak hours are towards the end of the working day, perhaps it is time to consider closing a bit later? Maybe add another shift, so as not to overburden your employees, and maximize the effectiveness of sales.
“How effectively am I using my staff?”
Alternatively, if footfall counters show that later hours experience fewer customers, it’s not as cost-effective to force all the employees to stay over. You can thus reduce labor costs during the less busy hours.
Not only that, by understanding how many visitors are in this or that service area at any given moment and how many customers are paying at a particular register, you can make informed decisions regarding balancing employees in different parts of your business.
There is a huge influx of visitors at some aisle? Add more workforce to counterbalance it. Easy as pie.
Measure your marketing efforts
“How effective are my marketing campaigns?”
The detailed data on traffic patterns and conversion rates provided by people counters is critical to measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Business metrics such as CPM or sales per square foot rely on accurate traffic data in order to help with marketing analytics. This applies to both large-scale marketing programs and targeted or in-store promotions.
High traffic may help determine the viability of a marketing campaign, especially if it is observed immediately after starting a seasonal promotion, targeted advertising, reward system, or any other multichannel marketing program.
“What can I do better?”
Marketing and advertising campaign success can be monitored against the traffic generated. When traffic counts climb, with sales numbers unchanged, this may indicate that the problem resides in marketing or customer experience.
You can always compare people counting results on the week of your promotions and campaigns with the week before or after, to see how effective your campaigns have been or if they have given you the ROI you expected. By placing a people counter throughout different sections of your store, you will be able to see where most of your traffic is and you can concentrate your marketing campaigns on those best performing sections.
and tweaked to deliver improvements and more focused results.
TL;DR
People counters help you:
- Assess your sales conversion rate
- Compare different business locations
- Look for patterns in your visitor traffic
- Identify high-performing locations and employees
- Evaluate marketing activities
Footfall analytics can’t tell businesses how exactly to conduct themselves. But people counter sensors and footfall traffic data does provide ample information for guiding decisions.
In the end, implementing visitor traffic counters can help you offer your customers the optimal shopping experience that they are looking for.
