E-commerce took off in the early 2000’s and created a buzz around 24-hour shopping, but it’s also heavily skewed retail marketing to rely on online insights to generate sales. In 2018, this focus is making a colossal shift back to a more balanced, in-depth ratio of offline to online consumer insights.
Offline insights are similar to Google Analytics for websites – rather than being for an online platform they identify and help retailers understand who is visiting their physical stores.
Understanding how consumers engage with your brand means collecting demographic data, social interests, movement and behavior data, dwell times, and frequency of visits. Physical venue insights make up a huge proportion of any industry customer base, and the importance of capturing this kind of data should not be ignored going into 2018.
The shift we are seeing in actioning consumer insights is using favored methods of data capture, such as website analytics, social media and e-commerce statistics, and including physical data capture methods, like point of sale, location and presence analytics, and social WiFi and guest WiFi analytics.
For example, when a consumer visits a retailer website there are tools and tactics for tracking their journey through the website, how long they dwell on particular product pages, and send an email from the CRM database reminding consumers there is an un-purchased product in their shopping basket.
Retailers can have this same example acted upon in real-time from when a consumer walks into their store, what zone of the shop they lingered in the longest to when they leave, and how to use this behaviour data to send hyper-targeted customer segment and product marketing to not only prompt their purchase, but also improve their future experiences in store.
Purple have introduced the Customer Algorithm, a concept that highlights this combination and action of both the online and offline worlds of data in order to achieve a high level of personalization.
Where online metrics aren’t available to paint a picture of customers’ demographics, likes or dislikes, transforming your venue to capture the data already available is the future of the customer experience.