6 Tools to Merchants Can Use to Quantify the Impact of In-Store Events

In-store analytics are reshaping the retail industry, providing merchants with straightforward ways to measure the ROI of offline sales and promotions. According to a survey sponsored by Brickstream/Nomi, retailers who use analytics are most interested in finding out how many customers are entering their stores and which promotions are attracting customers.

In seeking the answers to those questions, merchants are relying on hyperlocal platforms that generate in-store analytics. Seventy-one percent of global retailers expect to use some form of people-counting by the end of this year, and 68% expect to have wifi available in their stores. Being able to attribute offline marketing to in-store sales closes the loop for retail marketers and generates a better understanding of how everything from floor sets to promotions, and even weather patterns and staffing decisions, ultimately impact sales.

Here are six tools that merchants can use to attribute offline marketing to in-store activity.

1. Euclid: Attribute offline marketing to customer activity.
Earlier this summer, Euclid debuted a new product aimed at retailers, quick-service restaurants, malls, and auto dealerships. Dubbed EventIQ, the solution measures the impact that marketing events are having on in-store customer activity. Using their existing Wifi systems, merchants are able to analyze customer traffic patterns within the time frame of certain events. For example, a retailer running a storewide sale can determine whether sales met target goals during the event and how the event performed against similar store promotions.

2. Nomi: See which offline campaigns generate the most foot traffic.
Brickstream’s Nomi pulls data from in-store sensors and uses it to build business profiles. It then analyzes merchants’ marketing investments and provides insights into whether real world events, like sales and promotions, generated a positive ROI. Nomi is also able to increase customer engagement through the delivery of mobile campaigns. The company’s attribution tool measures which campaigns are driving customer visits, and benefits retailers by combining multiple KPIs (such as loyalty, traffic, and sales) in a centralized dashboard. In addition to measuring day-of sales, Nomi also quantifies the total value of new customers acquired by offline events.

3. Monolith: Understand where your shopping experience is falling short.
Monolith gives brick-and-mortar retailers the same competitive advantages as their e-commerce counterparts. Namely, it shows retailers whether they’re attracting the right customers and helps them to better understand how to engage shoppers. Retailers can pinpoint selected timeframes in their Monolith dashboards to view things like how many visitors came in, how long those people spent in their stores, and how many of those shoppers were men vs. women. They can also use dwell time data to identify the store zones where customers dropped off, parsed based on the in-store event.

4. Locarise: Capture high-level information, like dwell times and visit frequencies.
Using traffic analytics, Locarise helps retailers optimize their store layouts and anticipate customer demands. Filtering the results in their dashboards for for certain time periods—such as, when certain salespeople were working or during storewide sales—retailers are able to assess metrics like dwell times, visitor counts, and outside traffic metrics. They can also visualize the journey that customers take as they browse through their stores and better understand why some products are selling better than others. Locarise is powered by small sensors, which need nothing more than a power source to function.

5. Accelitec: Connect loyalty programs and beacons with the POS.
Accelitec uses cloud-based software to connect retailers with shoppers and leverage customer data. The company’s POS-connected service, BroadCast Offers, uses in-store beacons to generate shopper activity reports. Rather than relying on third-party apps to push advertisements on shoppers’ smartphones, Accelitec enables merchants to run campaigns that are recognized at the POS in real-time. Using beacon-triggered messages, retailers can pass along campaigns directly to their shoppers. Accelitec also provides performance reports and promotion measurements.

6. RetailNext: Measure in-store sales against real world events.
RetailNext collects data from a number of sources and uses proprietary technology to measure the influence of a wide spectrum of events, involving everything from promotional sales to weather patterns. RetailNext collects data from video cameras, POS systems, Wifi, staffing software, RFID tags, and promotional calendars. It then analyzes the data and formats it in a way that retailers can understand. Merchants who use RetailNext can uncover new opportunities to improve store profitability. For example, business owners and store managers can determine who their customers are, how frequently they come in, and what those customers are doing while they’re shopping in-store.

Know of other tools that retailers can use to measure the influence that offline events have on in-store sales? Leave a description in the comments.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.