Understanding consumer behavior data
Past behavior is one of the best ways to predict future behavior—and brands that understand this and act upon it can drive retail growth and brand loyalty. Successful brick and mortar retailers are adapting to the future by creating an exceptional in-store experience that mirrors e-commerce. Keep reading to take a closer look at what consumer behavior data is, how it strengthens the modern retail landscape, and how retailers can leverage it to drive business operations, marketing strategy, sales, and customer satisfaction.
Consumer behavior data is limited in traditional brick and mortar stores
Online shopping features expansive customer tracking and back-end analytics, yet typical brick and mortar stores have little insight into the winding journeys customers take before deciding to make a purchase.
For instance, imagine you are the owner of an e-commerce store. As customers browse, you automatically collect data as to how your visitors move around your site: what they click, their user pathway, how much time they spend in one place before leaving, what items are added or removed from their cart, etc. The data you can collect is nearly endless.
Traditional retail is void of these insights. The customer enters your store, buys something, and leaves. The only information you have collected is the sale itself.
By adding new technologies into the retail setting, you can elevate the data collected in brick and mortar to more closely resemble e-commerce. Equipped with these new capabilities, you can create touchpoints—much like a link on a website—that allow you to trace your customer's journey, see how they shop, what interests them, where they spend time, and use those insights to make changes that improve the performance of your store.
What is consumer behavior data, and why is it important?
As you can see in the above example, in addition to understanding who your ideal customers are, it’s even more important to understand how they shop.
Consumer behavior data helps retailers understand consumer lifestyle patterns and assesses factors such as purchasing behaviors, social trends, and frequency patterns as well as how customers perceive your marketing, sales, and customer service offers.
Online retailers use these data sets for predictive analytics, allowing them to communicate with customers in a productive way with targeted recommendations and ad campaigns. Modern retail technology brings this possibility to brick and mortar stores.
Behavior data is essential for modern retailers
Implementing touch points across multiple channels with modern technology creates an intricate visualization of customer journeys. In addition, these elaborate journeys are traveled by individual customers whose interests, needs, wants, values, and motivations are unique.
With powerful behavioral analytics, retailers will be equipped to predict and measure how people shop—not just what they buy—creating better, more effective marketing strategies as well as optimized processes, operations, and customer experiences. Layering behavior data is essential to understanding the shopper insights that drive growth.
Online empires like Amazon, Netflix, and Google base their growth and expansion strategy on behavior data and analytics. This way of operating is quickly becoming the status quo, and according to Pointillist, these powerhouses are realizing profit and succeeding because they’ve acted on the incredible volume of behavioral insights and used them as a driving force for strategy, expansion, and automation. These mega brands are a shining example of how to leverage these data sets. However, enterprises of any size, both on and offline, have the same opportunity. They can gain the same rewards if they listen to how the data speaks and adjust their approach to the general population accordingly.
Change the way you study your customers
Behavioral data-driven approaches were specifically designed to capitalize on the complex customer journey. As more consumers travel along the path to purchase, patterns in behavioral data start to take shape, explaining why successes or failures happened and certain outcomes were elicited for some customers and not others.
More touch points = more data points. With these valuable insights at hand, business owners and marketers can:
- Discover which offers to show to which customers and when
- Optimize the path to purchase through a more personalized experience
- Create more targeted messaging for branding and advertising purposes
- Encourage loyalty and greater spending while cross- and up-selling your best customers
- Target “look alike” customers that show similar behavior patterns to your most profitable consumers
52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications (Pointillist)
New marketing approaches open for your business if you capture, analyze, and utilize behavioral data. In conjunction with target customers’ demographics, you can identify behavior patterns that impact your most important KPIs, isolate those common characteristics, and classify these into new behavioral segments to drive engagement and growth.
Deliver an experience that harnesses the power of technology
For brick and mortar retailers trying to bridge the information gap, there’s good news. Innovative technology with behavior-based customer analytics has emerged. Implementing it in your store can help you discover deep, valuable insights about what your customers buy as well as how they shop—allowing you to make more informed business and marketing decisions.
The collection of data and analytics is not new, but the technology we use to better serve our customers is. By combining data collection methods with modern technology, we can hit those touchpoints with consumers in a genuine way that nurtures them along the path to purchase.
Data insight is gold: leverage it to create progress and purpose for your business
Integrating interactive merchandising displays from The Peak Beyond bridges the online/offline divide while providing an enhanced customer experience that streamlines your business. While the traditional retail model tracks sales data, our innovative technology captures additional customer touchpoints, collecting invaluable data across the entire in-store customer journey. With insights about daily engagements, consumer click pathways, most popular products viewed, and more, you'll be better equipped to shift your marketing focus as needed to drive more profit.
If you’re ready to start integrating modern technology into your business and leveraging behavioural data insights, get in touch today.
