Return on investment, or ROI, is important to retailers. If you’re spending money from your precious budget, you want to make sure there is an equal or increased payoff at the other end. Unfortunately, some expenditures, such as office supplies, may have no discernible return. These expenses fall under “the cost of doing business.” But when you spend money on advertising for your retail store, the goal is to see that money come back to you through increased traffic and a higher conversion rate. In order to determine the result of such efforts, however, you need to track traffic, sales, and other retail analytics. And using a video analysis people counter can help you gather necessary data as you work towards optimizing your ROI for certain expenditures.
You might not immediately see the correlation between spending, tracking, and retail sales. But monitoring traffic flow in your retail store and linking it up to marketing and sales data can definitely play a role in determining the effects of your efforts to increase customer traffic and sales. And the data you gather via shopper counting can offer valuable insights into which efforts are working and which are not, helping you to plan for future campaigns. Ensuring a high-quality return on investment requires back-end data analysis. And a people counting camera can play a crucial role in gathering needed shopper data.
Suppose you spend a portion of your budget on an ad campaign to let shoppers know you’re having a sale. Placing ads in print, radio, TV, and online can cost quite a bit of money. But with automatic people counting capabilities in your store, you can see if there is an uptick in traffic associated with your advertising efforts. You can then see how this data corresponds to sales during the same period. If you increase store traffic but not sales, you might determine that your advertising worked but something in the store stopped shoppers from making purchases. You could also use this data to compare your ad campaign to other efforts. What if you only spend a fraction of the money by simply placing signage in your windows to advertise a sale? Can you get the same uptick in traffic with far less expense?
Having this type of data at your fingertips can only help you when it comes to understanding the return you’re seeing from your effort and expense. And this knowledge can help you plan for the future as you discard marketing and sales efforts that aren’t working in favor of those that show the best ROI for your retail business. When you pair people counting with your marketing and sales data, you have the opportunity to pinpoint successes and failures as a means to ensure a high-quality return on investment in the future.
