To borrow wisdom from that noted retail marketer Sun Tzu, know your customer and know yourself, and you will be successful in every sale. Why not take that one step further? Know more about your customer and you can be even more successful.

It stands to reason that the more you know about your customers, the better you can serve their needs. WiFi analytics (also called location analytics) plays a key role in really getting to know your customers throughout the entire buyer’s journey.

For brick-and-mortar retailers, it can be invaluable to gain an understanding of where customers are spending their time and how they are moving through the store. This kind of data greatly informs which products are drawing customer interest. Moreover, this kind of data can provide insight into different customer personas based on aggregates of various journeys, informs us on the areas of the store that provide the greatest opportunities and value to specific kinds of customer. This in turn informs store layout and product placements.

With WiFi analytics and the insights it drives, retailers can see sales and other KPIs such as customer retention and lifetime value improve.

Being able to test and measure marketing decisions is critical. However, doing so in a store environment requires having the means to measure customer behavior over enterprise WiFi real-time.

Another value of having extremely accurate dwell time – the amount of time a customer spends in one place – and foot traffic data is the ability to measure response to promotional and in-store merchandising efforts.

This goes explicitly to the marketer’s classic dilemma of how to measure success.

With real-time analytics, retailers can track and monitor campaigns and promotional efforts and adjust as needed to influence results. Did adding digital signage solutions to the shoe display make customers stop and engage with those products more? With WiFi analytics from a trusted partner you can have certainty about where your money is going.

Equally interesting, and equally revenue impacting, is the ability to track the web browsing habits of in-store customers. As soon as a customer accesses a store’s cloud managed WiFi, they can make certain information available to the retailer, such as websites they visit and basic demographic information. If we know certain competitor products are being searched online, then we just learned something critical about which products are most desired by current store customers. That kind of data from enterprise WiFi can be game-changing in identify competitors, competing products and price-points. Armed with this information, savvy retailers can create targeted promotions on those particular products, positioned against those exact competitors.

Guest WiFi also gives access to the social media browsing habits of those same in-store customers. This kind of intelligence opens a whole new avenue of digital advertising that can be triggered in-store with the ability to place ads on those social sites as well as on the Guest WiFi splash screens.

Today’s retail landscape is all about the buyer’s journey. With WiFi analytics and Guest WiFi, retailers can tap into more stops along that journey than ever before.

About the Author

 

Jeff Bradbury works across markets to help distributed organizations identify trends that are driving digital transformation and adopt technologies critical to connecting their customers, employees, and locations. Follow Jeff Bradbury on LinkedIn and Twitter @TechXformation.