At one point or another, busy retail store owners have wished they could clone themselves or grow a second pair of hands to get everything done. NCC has been around long enough to tell you that splitting yourself in half is a bad idea, but a well-equipped point of sale (POS) system can help lighten the load. A POS system can collect a treasure trove of useful data for a store, including info about inventory, shopper insights and promotions.
Here are a few ways you can optimize shopper insights like a boss:
1. Review your shopper data regularly – weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually
Sales are one of the most important indicators for a retailer. Evaluate your store’s sales performance as often as possible to ensure that promotions are resonating, and your business has the products that people want. The POS system should allow you to run easy-to-read reports and charts without crunching numbers by the shift, hour, day, week, month or year. These analytics should be reviewed frequently to gain valuable shopper insights and make smarter decisions about inventory and store layout.
2. Identify past consumer behavior
Customer loyalty products should interface directly with your POS and give you shopper insights about buying habits, repeat customer visits or loyalty to certain brands or products. Leveraging loyalty technology to build a database of Shopper insights can help you determine what your peak times are and when you don’t need as much staff, allowing you to reduce payroll. You can also analyze the data to see which areas of the store are the busiest and assign more people to those stations, so customers don’t need to search for someone to open a fitting room or ring up their selections.
3. What promotions were you running?
If you’re running a marketing campaign—whether it’s direct mail, email or another form of promotion, POS analytics can measure its effectiveness. Customer loyalty can be hard to earn and even harder to hang on to, so gathering this information will help you create more meaningful marketing campaigns based on buying activity. There’s no sense in paying for campaigns that aren’t going to attract new foot traffic or drive repeat business. By tracking coupon codes and other promotional information, you can easily see which marketing tools are working or coupons are redeemed. Ineffective promotions that aren’t drawing shoppers or being cashed in should be dropped from your lineup.
4. Leverage the shopper data determined above to anticipate future trends
Anticipating future trends means looking back at the previous month, year or season. Run the analytics and reports on the previous period to help you evaluate which promotions were the most effective and consider repeating them. Review the sales information to see which products were best sellers, and which ones collected dust. Most POS systems interface with separate back office software that includes inventory functionalities that can tell you what you have in stock, what’s selling out and what has been sitting on the shelves and is ready for markdown. Using this data, you can make smarter decisions about inventory and purchase the stock that people want.
The right point of sale system can give you important shopper insights to help optimize your business. Using the POS system, you can run analytics and sales reports that will help you ensure you have the products customers want and run effective marketing campaigns.
