By Ralph Crabtree, Founder and CTO, Brickstream
The holiday season is the most profitable time of year for retailers, and from the time those first decorations go up until midnight New Year’s Eve, store managers are eager to make every moment count. Doing this successfully is a delicate balancing act, requiring an ability to adjust staffing, inventory, product placement, pricing and promotional strategies on a dime if needed. Statistics about last season’s traffic counts and sales are useful for corporate decision-makers, but won’t help address an unexpected surge of shoppers or an out-of-stock issue as it’s happening. Improving the customer experience, and ultimately retail performance during the holidays, demands insight into what’s happening in stores in real-time. How can retailers ensure that decision makers have the information they need to most profitably “manage the moment?”
Catching up with clickstream
In the ecommerce world, the data needed to manage the moment is readily available: whether making a purchase, clicking on offers or simply viewing merchandise, online shoppers leave a detailed digital trail. This clickstream data provides immediate value when analyzed to dynamically refine strategies. For example, decision makers can adjust holiday promotions based on click through rates or reach out directly to shoppers who have put potential gifts in their cart but haven’t yet made a purchase.
Leveraging data in brick-and-mortar environments requires a way to capture the shopper’s actions. Nobody shopping inside a store “clicks” on an end cap, after all, and Point-of-Sale (POS) data can only tell you about shoppers that bought something, not those that shopped but left empty-handed or bought on their mobile phones while standing in line.
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