Unlocking business potential with retail audience analytics

Understanding offline audience analytics

Audience analytics has long been a crucial aspect of marketing. However, until recently, understanding audience demographics, behavior, and lead-to-sale conversion was limited to online stores and marketplaces. Offline businesses, on the other hand, had to rely on traffic counting sensors, sales figures, and numerous assumptions.

Fortunately, advancements in AI and sensor-based computer vision have changed the game. Now, anyone can gather detailed and reliable data on visitors, including their demographics (such as age and gender), emotions, dwell time, heat maps, and customer journey maps (CJM). This wealth of information can help businesses across various industries optimize their operations and enhance their marketing efforts.

For instance, armed with data on visitors in different locations and their behavior and demographics, retailers can make data-driven decisions regarding store layout, procurement, staffing, and even offline POS promotions for brands. Similarly, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) can tailor special offers based on traffic data, visitor demographics, and menu board attention time in different locations.

With audience analytics, businesses can now make informed choices, improve their marketing strategies, and ultimately drive growth.

How does retail audience analytics work?

DISPL's Visitor Insights is an audience analytics solution that utilizes strategically placed sensors in stores to capture data on surrounding traffic. This approach ensures that data is processed locally on a computer, avoiding the need to send unprocessed video streams elsewhere. By doing so, visitor privacy is protected, and legal regulations are complied with.

DISPL's AI algorithm analyzes the information captured by the sensors and collects over 17 metrics, including age, gender, attention and dwell time, emotion, as well as more specific details like headwear, glasses, hair color, and facial hair.

Only the processed data is then sent to the platform, where it is combined with information from other sensors across all locations. DISPL then creates a dashboard that provides the most useful data for marketing and business purposes. This dashboard allows users to filter data by time, location, or specific device. Additionally, the raw data (i.e., metrics before being included in the dashboard) can be exported and analyzed in an external business intelligence system.

Implementing offline audience analytics

Implementing audience analytics is a straightforward process. All you need is a sensor, computer (or player), and software license. We offer a Fast Start Kit that includes everything you need at an affordable price. Alternatively, if you prefer to use your own hardware, you will only need a software subscription. For most situations, you won't need crazy expensive tech. Fortunately, our software supports most operating systems, including Windows, Android, and Linux.

When it comes to setting up your new sensors, you have two options. You can either connect them to a screen to enhance your digital signage with targeting and view tracking, or you can place the sensors anywhere around the store. In the latter case, all you will need is a power socket and Wi-Fi.

All devices will be connected to a single CMS, which allows you to analyze data from all locations, control and monitor all devices, view them on a map, and manage content if you use digital signage capabilities.

6 benefits of retail audience analytics

The power of real-time digital signage targeting

Real-time targeting is a crucial advantage of audience analytics. By utilizing real-time data, retailers can choose which offerings and marketing campaigns will be shown to specific audiences that visit their stores. This personalized approach enhances the likelihood of conversion and fosters customer loyalty. Through real-time targeting, retailers can present personalized offers and promotions that deeply resonate with individual customers, thereby increasing the probability of upsells.

Optimizing store layout and merchandising

Audience analytics provides insights into customer behavior, allowing retailers to optimize store layout and merchandising strategies. By analyzing shopper flow, retailers can understand how customers navigate their stores and make data-driven decisions regarding product placements and visual merchandising. This optimization creates an appealing shopping environment and enhances the overall customer experience.

Personalizing marketing and promotions

Audience analytics enables retailers to segment their customer base and create personalized marketing campaigns. By analyzing audience data, retailers can tailor promotions and offers to specific customer segments, increasing the chances of conversion and customer loyalty. Personalized marketing creates a more engaging and relevant shopping experience for customers, leading to increased sales and customer satisfaction.

Improving inventory management

Having access to information on visitor demographics and traffic in different locations allows retailers to make informed decisions about which categories of products are likely to perform better in specific stores.

For instance, if one store has a younger audience, it is expected to sell new trendy products more successfully than a store with an older audience. By utilizing demographic data, retailers can proactively determine their procurement strategy and allocate more inventory to the first store without having to wait for sales data analysis. This enables them to respond quickly to market trends and maximize sales potential.

Enhancing customer service

By analyzing audience and shopper analytics, retailers can identify pain points and bottlenecks in the shopper's journey. This information helps improve customer service by addressing issues such as long wait times, product unavailability, or inadequate staffing.

Retailers can use the insights from audience analytics to create a seamless and personalized shopping experience, fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty.

For example, using time heatmaps, you can determine high traffic times of the day and week and understand visitor behavior. Leads are those who engage with the products or digital signage, while bounced visitors are those who quickly leave without any engagement. If you notice high traffic at a specific time of the day but most of them bounce, it is worth investigating. Perhaps there aren't enough salespeople on the store floor, and customers leave because no one helps them.

Data-driven decision making

Offline retailers have traditionally relied on sales data, surveys, and industry experience to drive business decisions. However, the landscape has evolved with the addition of audience data. Now, retailers can complement their existing knowledge with valuable insights from CJMs, heatmaps, demographic data, dwell time, and engagement metrics.

The emergence of AI-powered audience analytics has revolutionized the way retailers operate. By harnessing the power of data across various aspects of their business, such as inventory management, marketing strategies, store operations, and customer service initiatives, retailers can now make informed decisions.

These accurate and actionable insights enable retailers to optimize their business operations and drive growth. Moreover, when combined with existing data, they become crucial in competing with online stores and marketplaces. With AI-powered audience analytics, retailers have the tools they need to stay ahead in the ever-changing retail landscape.

Ensuring security and GDPR-compliance

When implementing audience analytics, security and compliance are of utmost importance. Our approach ensures that data processing is performed "at the edge," meaning on the device itself. This guarantees that no images or videos are transmitted elsewhere.

To protect visitor privacy, only metrics and raw data that do not contain any personal information are sent to the DISPL platform. This approach aligns with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We have received confirmation from multiple law firms in the European Union and the USA, and we can provide their results upon request.

By leveraging audience analytics, retailers can gain valuable insights while maintaining customer privacy and complying with relevant regulations.

Conclusion

Offline audience analytics is a powerful tool that can unlock the full potential of retail. By leveraging real-time targeting and valuable visitor insights, businesses can optimize their operations, enhance the customer experience, and ultimately drive sales and growth. With the rapid evolution of the retail landscape, embracing audience analytics is no longer a luxury but a necessity for retailers looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Contact the DISPL team to schedule a free consultation on implementing audience analytics and unlock the full potential of your business!