There are many challenging aspects to retail. In addition to being a highly competitive industry, it can be difficult to achieve high margins selling physical goods, especially when they’re perishable. This means brands need to seek out ways to distinguish themselves, while also finding ways to bolster the bottom line. Analytics can help with this.
Here are four retail analytics use cases.
1. Build Better Ideal Customer Profiles
Ideal customer profiles are an important part of successful targeted retail sales strategies. An ideal customer profile is an amalgamation of traits, both demographic and qualitative, allowing brands to better market their products and services. This is important, especially in the era of ecommerce, because brands are only going to sell goods if they know the right people to target.
Retail analytics can help brands create far more comprehensive ideal customer profiles. In the past, there was only so much information available for these composites. Now, thanks to the vastly greater amount of data available to organizations, it’s possible to get far more in-depth. For instance, national brands can refine customer profiles based on regional nuances. The better job companies do speaking to their customers, the better chance they have of fostering a loyal, long-term relationship.
2. Track Sales In Real Time
In the past, retailers could only get a gauge of sales after the fact. When dealing with businesses with many locations, it can be difficult to spot opportunities for greater operational efficiencies.
By employing retail analytics, organizations can do a far better job of tracking their sales as they happen, through a variety of metrics. There are a few reasons why this is important. For starters, brands can identify certain trends in sales, such as times when people are more likely to spend more. Finding these patterns can lead to a greater understanding of what’s motivating customers.
Real-time retail analytics can also be hugely advantageous for ecommerce marketing campaigns. When you can track sales as they happen, it’s possible to make conversion-boosting adjustments on the fly.
3. Put Analytics In the Hands of More People
When it comes to retail, those who know the most about daily operations and products are often the ones who work with them directly. These individuals, however, don’t always have training with business intelligence tools. It’s wise to seek out a retail analysis tool that’s easily used by most employees, even if they don’t have a data background.
Putting retail analytics in the hands of all employees means operational insights can come from anywhere, at any time. It also allows for ad hoc analysis, permitting quick, data-driven decisions to be made on lower-tier priorities. ThoughtSpot is one platform that empowers data democratization through search-based analytics tools. This works much like a search engine, which enables those without extensive data experience to easily run queries.
4. Identify Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities
Retail is one of the top areas in which cross-selling and upselling can lead to drastically improved sales numbers. It’s possible to identify better opportunities for both of these by using retail analytics.
One of the most obvious ways of doing this is recommending products to individuals based on the shopping behaviors of others who purchased similar goods. Aggregating sales data with this intention makes it possible to show people more things they’re actually likely to purchase. These recommendations can get increasingly personalized based on data.
Looking at seasonal trends can also reveal more selling opportunities. It’s possible a certain group of customers buys a specific product disproportionately at certain times of year. Finding those trends in the data can allow for retailers to predict greater demand, and meet it with targeted marketing and elevated supply levels.
Retail analytics is increasingly becoming an essential part of running a successful busines in today’s world. Consider how retail analytics adoption can elevate the decision-making within your organization.
