Closing the gap between your online and offline customer data

Black-friday closing the gap between online and offline data
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Are you capturing customer data from your physical spaces? If not, you could be missing a trick. With the rise of online sales and convenience buying, offline seems to have taken a back seat, with businesses now focusing solely on collecting customer data from the online space. The problem…

…offline still accounts for a huge proportion of a business’s customer base, particularly in the retail industry.

Not convinced?

Earlier this year, Amazon announced a collaboration with Best Buy to help sell their new Amazon Fire TV after acknowledging, ‘you sometimes need to touch things to buy them’ – reinforcing the importance of physical stores.

The move also broadly suggests that Amazon can no longer achieve the scale they want without access to brick and mortar. Following the announcement, Carol Spieckerman, a retail analyst at Spieckerman Retail, said: “True scale is no longer achieved in a single channel.”

Read more about the Amazon and Best Buy collaboration here.

Why offline?

The importance of understanding customers and their behavior within your physical store should not be underestimated; businesses that fail to do so risk being left behind.

Think about how many people visit your store each day, especially when there is a sale or specific promotion running. Unless you ask for a customer’s details upon purchasing an item (that’s if they even do so – they may visit and leave your store with no contact), you have no way of knowing who they are or contacting them again in the future.

Data capture methods in a physical space can include; point of sale, location analytics, and WiFi analytics, just to name a few. Using these methods, you can begin to understand who your customers are (name, age, gender, contact), and how they engage with your venue (frequency of visits, dwell time, entry and exit points). Not only this, but it enables you to reach a proportion of your customer base that otherwise would’ve been missed through deploying digital data capture alone.

Combining this data with your online efforts gives you a more complete view of your customer base, enabling you to analyze and improve your online and in-store customer experience more effectively.

Now I’m not one to wish away the year, and I hate myself for saying this, but with events such as Black Friday and Christmas fast approaching, can you afford not to capture offline customer data?

Click here to read more about how you can increase customer retention by 24% with offline data capture.

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