Omnichannel Strategy – Getting More Out of In-Store

Marketing analytics and AI are essential to building and maintaining a successful omnichannel strategy.

Organizations have worked hard to close the gap between each shopper’s interaction with their brands, both online and in physical stores. Prior to the pandemic, e-commerce attracted customers because it was more convenient, but now people shop increasingly online due to physical distancing requirements and local sanitary rules. In response, marketers and retailers are embracing omnichannel marketing to enhance customer experience, build more meaningful relationships with their audience, improve merchandising performance, and streamline operations across their brick-and-mortar stores.

When combined with artificial intelligence (AI), in-depth marketing analytics helps businesses develop deep insights about their performance so they can invest more strategically.

Key features

By using in-depth marketing analytics of their brick-and-mortar activities, organizations can develop useful metrics about shopper foot traffic, demographics (including age and gender), the length of each shopper’s visit, time spent browsing before service, time spent waiting in line, and determine if shoppers are browsing or buying. With this information, store managers can anticipate work activities, optimize their staff levels, and assess employee performance.

Marketing analytics can determine which items are more popular in the aisles and which displays garner the most attention. Perhaps of greater value is the software’s ability to evaluate merchandising layouts and floor plan performance using focal point analysis.

When marketing analytics software is enhanced with AI computer vision technology, it can measure the effectiveness of a store’s communication. It adds value by identifying potential visitors, Opportunity to See (OTS), engagement for individual store displays and checkout aisles based on their placement and attractiveness. It delivers metrics about a store’s advertising and merchandizing performance.

Thanks to its context-aware automation capabilities, in-store marketing analytics software can automatically adapt digital signage content based on real-time events, such as weather conditions, product stocking levels, store traffic or even the viewer’s demographic profile.

For example, weather alerts can be triggered in case of an imminent threat (like severe snowstorms or hurricanes). Businesses can even program their digital signage software to display ads for products related to these events and the software can also take into account a viewer’s age and gender to ensure the content shown is relevant to their needs.

An Omnichannel Solution

A true AI-powered marketing analytics software can empower omnichannel strategies that are essential to every bricks-and-mortar retailer’s success. It lets organizations optimize their staffing levels, improve customer queue management, and refine merchandising. This software’s extensive data-gathering capabilities supports targeted customer messaging, global online communication and personalized service which greatly enhances the in-store experience and improves each store’s competitive advantage.

Learn more about physical space marketing analytics benefits.