How Enterprise Retailers Can Utilize People Counting Solutions

The question every retailer should be able to answer easily:

How many people come through my doors each day?

If you're not sure, or if you're guessing, you're missing out on valuable data that could help you run your business more effectively. And we say it's time to stop guessing and start making strategic decisions.

Here's how you can utilize people counting solutions to benefit your business.

What is foot traffic and people counting?

First, you have to understand what foot traffic is. This will help you further understand how a people counter can help you take charge of it.

Foot traffic for retailers, in simple terms, means the presence and movement of potential customers walking in or around a particular space of a retail store.

Higher foot traffic generally equates to higher sales, as you have more potential customers passing through your business and more opportunities to sell.

For those of you who wants to know about "foot traffic" and "people counting", we have a huge guide that can answer every question you have in your mind: The Ultimate Guide to Foot Traffic and People Counting

Why You Need to Track Foot Traffic

The answer is simple: you need to collect data to understand consumer behavior, one of the most important elements of successful retail operation and marketing.

Let's say, for example, that you collect data on foot traffic and find that you have more people passing through at specific times of day, on certain days. That might tell you, for example, that you're benefiting from a lunch rush, or getting a crowd after work, or getting shoppers who have free weekends.

Once you know this, you can target your retail efforts toward high-traffic periods to ensure you catch customers at the right moment. You can also make informed decisions about how to run your store, like when you need to have more staff.

But you won't know what those moments are if you don't have hard data to back up your theories.

How to Utilize Foot Traffic Data

In reality, there are a huge variety of ways you can use foot traffic data, each telling you something unique about your store, your customer base, and how to maximize your performance.

Here are a few ways to turn foot traffic data into real insights.

➣ Measure Performance

How does your store perform? How are your marketing efforts paying off in conversions? How many customers who pass through actually end up converting?

Measuring foot traffic offers a window into other critical elements of performance, allowing you to better understand where your store succeeds. That way, you can maximize your strengths to drive further conversions.

➣ Compare Performance

If you're enterprise retailer, then it means you have dozens of stores in various locations.

So the question is do you know how they are performing compared to each other?

Door traffic data allows you to see how much traffic each store gets, as well as how that translates to conversions. This helps you understand whether each location is successfully targeting your audience and whether each location is offering sufficient ROI.

➣ Opening and Closing Stores

Opening and closing stores is not a decision to be taken lightly. Door traffic is an essential component of that decision--in fact, it's critical for identifying what stores are thriving, what stores are failing, and what can be done to save a failing location.

Understanding your foot traffic at each location allows you to see whether your store is performing similarly to other locations. Are marketing campaigns that worked at other locations working here? Are you seeing foot traffic around the same time of day? What about the type of crowd?

Collecting and analyzing the data allows you to truly understand why a store is working (or failing) so that you can make strategic decisions to strengthen your company as a whole.

➣ Seeing and Incorporating Data

In addition, collecting data allows you to check the effectiveness of your strategic decisions and plan for the future.

If your foot traffic counter has an API that could be connected to your analytics and business intelligence tools, then you can easily incorporate the store traffic data to other data points and see a bigger picture for your company.

➣ Staff Scheduling

Since you are an enterprise brand with each store or region having dozens of employees, you have to find smart ways to optimize their working schedules. To manage your daily rush effectively, you need to have more employees available during your busiest periods - which also means hiring less employees when your stores are not that crowded.

The thing is the only way you can arrange your staff scheduling more effectively is using a foot traffic solution to use the store traffic data to backup your hypothesis.

➣ Marketing Attribution

Foot traffic also allows you to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.

Let's say you ran a social media promotion or an email marketing campaign and wanted to see whether customers were coming in. Door traffic data, combined with buying patterns, would allow you to see whether your campaign got the results you were hoping to achieve.

➣ Predictive Analytics

Of course, the benefits of people counting are not limited to historic data. You can actually use a people counter to perform predictive analytics and improve your strategic decisions.

Let's say, for example, you want to maximize the future efficacy of staffing decisions and targeted marketing. The right people counter allows you to see data on a granular level and predict how foot traffic will perform at similar times in the future.

How to Track Foot Traffic

Fortunately, there are several available technologies for you to leverage people counting. The trick is knowing what you need and where to look for it.

For example, many businesses find technology that they like but struggle with the installation process. Video camera sensors, for example, require specialized installation and technicians, which means that you need to close the store, drill the walls, and run hardware to connect to your network.

Dor's thermal sensor has a peel-and-stick application that allows you to set up and carry on your workday in just a few minutes. Plus, it doesn't need your network to start counting your store traffic, which means you can start collecting data as soon as you apply the sensor.

And that means you can focus on what matters most: your customers.

Ready to Benefit from People Counting?

Ready to see the benefits of people counting software? If so, Dor is here to offer a tool that changes the way you think about foot traffic tracking technologies.

We firmly believe that technology should support you, not slow you down. That's why we developed tools that are fast to install and easy to use, providing real, practical data in no time at all so you can see your ROI build in real-time.

Because at the end of the day, you should be focusing on your customers.

Click here to discover how a people counting solution like Dor can help you make better business decisions based on your store's foot traffic data.