Whether you are an online business or brick and mortar store, you more than likely use analytics to understand how customers and visitors are engaging with your brand/business.
It’s important not to underestimate the power of this valuable data, for online businesses they can help you understand poor-performing vs high performing content or the journey which your visitors take whilst using your site.
For brick and mortar venues, it used to be a little more tricky but in recent years, much like Purple, businesses and software/hardware solutions now allow physical venues to act like Google Analytics or any other form of web analytics by using the guest wifi, sensors, BLE beacons or a variety of other methods.
Truly understand offline and online visitors
Understanding who your customers/visitors are is imperative to business success, that’s why there are thousands of different tools out there designed to help businesses gain a much deeper understanding of the people visiting their online website or store.
For online businesses Tools such as Google Analytics can really help you drill down on the types of demographics.
The new Google Analytics 4 makes it even easier for users to quickly filter by the results that they want to see.
Users can now instantly view top pages and screens, acquisition channels, and e-commerce revenue.
If you own a brick and mortar business and want to view data in the same way, venues can utilize their guest wifi as an analytics tool which can be combined with 2D and 3D sensors to provide up to 98% accuracy when counting real-time visitor numbers.
The analytics tools essentially allow insight into your physical space, totally transforming your venue into a live analytics platform that you can use to understand visitor behavior, visitor numbers, demographics, and more.
It pays big to go small when it comes to audience segmentation and targeting. Identifying niches that make up your customer group can help you create more effective targeted ad campaigns that boost engagement.
Generate visitor heatmaps
Regardless of if you’re an offline or online business, generating heatmaps of where you customers and visitors go whilst on your website or in your venue, is one of the most visually simple things to understand.
For online businesses, heatmaps are a powerful way to understand what users do on your website pages —where they click, how far they scroll, what they look at or ignore.
A powerful tool for understanding if people are:
- Reaching important content or failing to see it
- Finding and using a page’s main links, buttons, opt-ins, and CTAs
- Getting distracted by non-clickable elements
Similarly, for brick and mortar businesses, this can be done by using presence data collected via the WiFi.
This data will allow venue owners to view where their most popular points of entry and exit are, how people are interacting with the venue, areas of dwell and much more.
This can be then used to optimize your venue layout, place new products and promotions in areas of high dwell to ensure they get the most attention and ultimately boost revenue.
Hyper-personalized marketing campaigns
According to a report by SocialMediaToday, The key to email marketing success is personalization, and this doesn’t just apply to emails.
Remember Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign? Seeing your name on a bottle for some reason made the desire to drink a Coke much higher than usual.
It prompted consumers to discuss the product over every social media platform you could think of creating a surge of online content.
Consumers felt like their lifestyles were the center of the narrative, instead of feeling like they were merely tools in the company’s promotional machine.
I’m not suggesting you start putting random names on all your products/services.
I’ve made the point to demonstrate how a simple marketing technique created one of the most successful campaigns in recent time and the main focus of it was personalization.
Personalization continues to become much more advanced, allowing for deeper and more meaningful customer relationships, that encourage conversions and increases sales on both eCommerce stores and other websites.
There is a vast array of online tools for personalization for websites, less so for in-store/physical venues.
For physical locations and businesses, WiFi marketing software can assist with creating personalized marketing campaigns for those that have logged onto guest wifi using things such as forms and social media logins.
Use this software to tailor marketing campaigns based on a person’s interests, hobbies, and key demographics.
Lower costs and increase revenue
Analytics can be used in a range of ways both online and offline, making it easier to control costs and increase revenue.
For instore businesses, presence analytics provides key insight into a venue’s footfall.
Collating this data over time allows businesses to identify trends and patterns in visitor numbers, use this to better manage staffing requirements.
E-commerce, retail, and grocery stores can all benefit from analytics that can be used to predict buying patterns.
Using past data to make informed decisions about current stock levels based on trends is a great use case for utilizing analytics within your business.
In-store and brick and mortar businesses can utilize occupancy counting solutions that enable them to understand historic visitor numbers, using this information they can better plan for staffing requirements and stock levels.
Make more informed decisions
Just “going with your gut” doesn’t cut it anymore when it comes to maintaining inventory, pricing solutions, or hiring talent, companies are using analytics and a methodical approach to make decisions that improve efficiency, risk management and revenue.
Businesses that use data are three times as likely to report that their decision-making has improved, so why wouldn’t you use it?