Brick-and-mortar stores have been facing stiff competition from online shops for several years now. Those that have managed to stay open for years have owners who know the importance of giving customers the best experience to ensure they return and share some encouraging word-of-mouth marketing.

Understanding the trends of customer walk-ins and walkouts gives retailers a higher chance of improving their service. With the information at hand, they can provide visitors with better shopping experiences. This, in turn, can boost their revenues and profit margins.

Counting the number of customers that enter the shop is a crucial part of staying on top of these trends. In the past, an employee would act as a footfall counter at the store’s entrance, clicking an old-fashioned customer counter or logging them in a record book.

Modern footfall counting solutions have made it easier and more accurate for retails stores to get details regarding the number of people that enter their premises. This data gives owners key insights about the ratios of new and old customers that they can use to create or fine-tune their business strategies.

Reasons to Invest in Footfall Analytics Technology

A footfall counting system comes with sensors that need to be placed at the store’s entrance. They use infrared technology to record each time a person passes an established point.

This software is easy to use and install and provides retail stores these noteworthy benefits:

1.It helps owners identify the store’s pain points.

With the data the footfall counter provides, shop owners will be able to determine the reasons behind their failure to facilitate sales conversions.

These pain points that cause loss of sales include poor customer service, long queues, or incorrect product placement.  

By knowing about these problem areas, owners can work on improving their customer service, efficiency at checkout counters, and proper placement of products. All these can boost conversions and sales in the store.

2.It can improve the quality of customer service in retail stores.

Footfall analytics software provides retailers insights into what it’s like to be a customer. As such, they will have an idea of how appealing their shop is and whether their processes are producing the expected results or not.

By accessing the right data, store owners can also come up with steps to help their employees improve the way they deal with customers to boost the chances of moving them to the next buying stages.

These strategies can include investing in a customer service course for the sales staff and leadership training for the managers and supervisors.

All these steps can help retail store owners make smart decisions on how to improve the quality of customer service on the premises. 

3.It measures the effectiveness of new marketing campaigns.

Business owners allocate a large amount of their budget on offline and online marketing campaigns. It is, therefore, only natural that they know that they are putting their money into a worthwhile investment.

A footfall counter system allows store owners to know immediately if their marketing spend is yielding results. It works as a monitoring tool that provides users information regarding the increase or decrease of customer visits after a campaign has been launched.

With this data, retailers can decide whether to continue running a particular campaign, discontinue it, or modify it to get better results.

4.It can help with staff planning and creating better work schedules.

Studying footfall analytics can help store owners identify the peak hours and days for shopping.

Using this data, retailers or managers can create better shifting schedules to ensure there are enough employees at the store during these peak times. The information can also help management to position their staff better in busier areas of the shop.

For retailers with several branches, the data can also make it easier for the management or HR team to distribute more employees to the stores that need them the most during the hectic periods.

5.It improves store performance, sales and profits.

Finally, all the information that a footfall counting system provides, and the subsequent steps to incorporate them into the store’s operations, translate to better performance, conversions, sales and profits.

Regardless of whether the reason for the poor performance of the shop is poor customer service, store layout, or marketing strategy, retailers can fix the mistakes immediately to get the most from their products and employees. All they need is access to the right data first.

For retail store owners ready to make great strides toward success, include investing in footfall analytics software in your plans to achieve your goals.