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retailSuccess in retail often comes down to a counting game.  How many people pass by your store?  How many come inside?   How long do they stay?  And most importantly how many ultimately buy?

Today, the retail counting game has gotten a lot easier because we can now count devices as proxies for people, since many potential customers today, myself included, won’t leave home without their smartphone.  As soon as they enter a store, the beacon on their cell phone effectively announces its arrival to the Wi-Fi network and voilà, we have a count.

With the help of CMX Presence Analytics, these smart devices can help answer many key retailing questions with a single access point.

  • Who?
    Who is passing by the store versus coming in?  Presence Analytics uses both the cell phone’s signal strength as well as the time spent in the area to determine the number of people walking by versus in-store visitors.  Presence Analytics provides simple, quick reports on retail conversion metrics.   You can also track how often visitors return to a store in a given time period can be tracked, which can be key for customer loyalty programs.
  • What?
    By combining basic traffic data with sales figures, it becomes clearer what’s hot and what’s not.  An increase in the sales conversion rate might indicate that last week’s promotion was a big hit with customers.
  • When?
    With data tracked over time – daily, weekly or monthly trends can indicate when a store is most crowded with buying customers. This information supports staffing and inventory plans.
  • Where?
    For retailers with more than one location, data from  different stores could be easily compared, illustrating the relative streghts of the different stores .

And the last question, of course is “Why?”   That’s where the magic comes in!  Presence analytics supports the who, what, when and where of retail traffic data – providing the retailer with the information needed for them to determine the “why” for their business decisions.

Here’s a quick video on how CMX Presence Analytics works:

How will you use Presence Analytics to drive critical business decisions in your retail establishment?  Leave a comment and let us know!



Authors

Michael Zhao

Technical Leader

Enterprise Networking Group