Retailers need to understand the physical space to keep their brick-and-mortar stores successful

If you are operating a Brick-and-Mortar store, the future can be a little daunting. Dozens of E-commerce stores are popping up every day while physical retail stores are closing at a rapid pace. Major retail chains such as Macy’s and Nordstorm have suffered from revenue losses, resulting in stores shutting down all over the US.

It is true that today Brick-and-Mortar stores are losing its appeal to shoppers as online retail grows, but that does not mean that it is the end?

Physical stores still remain the most important touch point for shoppers and by understanding your retail space, you can remain competitive alongside your online competitors. 

1. The future of retail is about creating interactive experiences; bringing personalised and contextual advice through avatars and virtual assistants to create that unique shopping journey online store cannot offer.

To run a successful retail store, you need to go beyond fulfilling your shoppers’ needs of just selling products and earning profits, and strive to build a retail place that creates a different shopping experience and journey for your shoppers.

Going the extra mile to bring personalisation and delightful in-store shopping experience will extend the longevity of your shoppers browsing in your stores, leading to up-selling opportunities and drawing them back to visit your store in future.

But how do you know if you are truly creating that extraordinary shopping experience?

2. Brick-and-Mortar stores need to adopt technology to meet the changing needs of customers. The objective is to make it possible to automate action, increase in-store shoppers, and improve conversion rates and basket size.

Start with bringing the power of online shopper tracking to the store through the use of sensor tools to capture data about your physical space and understand how shoppers are moving within your store. Today, obtaining richer and more dynamic data have become a reality with the use of these powerful sensing technologies and analytics tools. The adoption of sensing technology and analytics tools creates the digital connections between the physical and virtual retail space, providing retailers with data and analytic insights to remove all the guesswork out of the business. Key questions such as:

• Do you have a deep understanding of your shoppers?
• How are your shoppers moving in your store?
• Do you know what is attracting your shoppers to visit your store?
• Which marketing and promotions initiatives or special events are effective?
• Are you offering the right product mix?

Now you will be able to quantify the success of your marketing campaigns, provide you with better understanding of the product mix to offer, track movements and measure the impact of the changes made in your store, such as store layout or product assortment which may affect customer behaviour.

3. In-store analytics employ the use of various sensors to bring about data-driven decisions.Retailers need to explore both passive and active tracking to gather robust data.

Selecting the appropriate in-store analytics tools to facilitate tracking and sensing operations depends on a few factors. While many will rush into implementation, it is worthwhile to start by considering these questions before deciding on the best business decisions to take.

• What is the scale of your deployment?
• What is the nature of your retail business? Supermarkets, apparels, food?
• What type of in-store data do you want to capture?

As not all devices are created equal, the different types of technologies provide multi-dimensional set of data and differing levels of data granularity. Retailers need to consider various technology options to overcome some of the dynamics in the environment and human privacy factors to ensure a compelling feature design and sustainable business model. For instance, some shoppers may not actively turn on their Wi-Fi /Bluetooth on their smartphones, using passive tracking such as video could help retailers gather insights better.

There is no doubt that the physical retail scene is being disrupted by new technologies and opening up many new opportunities to businesses. However, the worrying thought of impacting overall business profitability and revenue margins to cover the total cost of ownership has become a deterring factor for many retailers. There’s a lot to consider when it comes to implementing sensing devices in your store. Your decision-making depends greatly on the needs of your business. Start with budget and scale of deployment, and from there narrow down what are the necessary features you require and the ease of integrating it to your existing operation systems.

Creating an in-store digital shopping experience is undeniably the way to remain relevant and competitive. However, it is vital to keep a balance between managing cost and implementing these in-store technologies to understand your retail space better, with the objective of improving your in-store touch points and creating interactive experiences that online stores cannot offer.