Introduction
Data fuels business intelligence to generate insights that help to understand past & present business operations & also predict future outcomes. One can get key insights from data to make out & predict customer needs. While we discuss the steps to use BI to boost in-store sales, we must understand the importance of mixing online & offline experiences to come out of the just brick-&-mortar operations. It can be done by harnessing the power of BI & analytics. But you must be well-versed in parameters for choosing the best bi software. One example of this (and probably the best example) is Jack Maa of Alibaba. He managed to understand the vital needs of integrating online & offline retail to create one single joint retail environment. This promises to increase sales through better customer engagement. Best business intelligence solution has provisions for that. The strategy entails complete adoption of technologies throughout the retail value chain by putting data analysis at the heart of retail transformation. Business intelligence is the means to assemble & analyze complete information about products, sales, customers, price, promotions to accurately understand & anticipate customer needs & use the right strategies to meet them. Here’s to tips for increasing sales through BI:
Tip No 1: Feed insights to educate & empower shop floor staff
Best business intelligence solutions like WovVBI from WovV Technologies help sales teams to enhance performance & build customer loyalty. Analysis of customers’ profile & shopping history captured through PoS & CRM applications & maintained in BI databases can reveal shoppers’ behavior & purchase preferences. The insights generated through these BI solutions can help sales representatives to better understand customers’ interest, purchasing pattern, & shopping habits to guide customers for in-store purchase through better recommendations. Nobody can deny the growth potential of online sales but today it still accounts for around 20% of the total retail sales. What could be the reasons for that? While it’s true that logistics reasons in the rural & semi-urban areas may be a hindrance, one must not forget that for even urban shoppers in-store sales resonate well in comparison to online sales. A primary reason for this is customers get valuable in-store sales representatives’ advice while doing in-store purchases. By increasing the possibility of capturing & analyzing in-store customers’ data, business intelligence and data analytics applications can help retailers to capitalize on these strengths which is inherent in only brick-&-mortar companies.
Tip No: 2 Create personalized, pepped up & immersive customer experience
Many recent surveys are pointing to one trend: offer a personalized experience to customers, that way they will like to do multiple purchases from your brand. Individualized, emotion-rich, high-touch customer interaction is no longer a ‘may be it helps’ kind of thing. It’s essential, it’s helpful in securing continued growth. The structured & unstructured data has precious insight hidden underneath, you must have the ability to aggregate such data & process it to generate valuable information which will help in understanding, envisioning, & fulfilling customer needs. Business intelligence reporting makes it possible. Today, price is not the only factor which drives purchasing decisions, today’s customer has greater disposable income, they pursue brand loyalty, they are status conscious, they are style conscious, & therefore they look for curated shopping experience which fulfills their individual, personal choice. And this is not unachievable, if you are really customer focused, there are many advanced technology based business intelligence solutions which can help you in that. BI software has a provision of fine-grained funnel analysis which provides intelligent information to help you review & improve customer engagement at granular level, yes, for every interaction. Access to customers’ past purchasing data & ability to work on this data to come up with valuable insights arm retailers to build strategies to win customers’ heart with personalized, tailored experiences.
Tip No 3: Create powerful, effective, & successful marketing campaigns
Recently digitization has picked up in retail allowing retailers to capture the purchasing history of customers through computerized POS. This is really precious data, if one can process it well it will generate valuable insights which can be leveraged to create effective retail marketing strategy. BI platforms provide answers to the key questions which can help in shaping the right marketing strategy & also improve the KPIs. Some of these questions are:
- Which products are hot selling?
- What is the shoppers demographic?
- What is the comparative store performance?
- What are the hidden trends in the sale of products which can be of interest to us?
Businesses capitalizing on business intelligence tools are capable & confident in making very effective marketing strategies as they get a piercing view of customer data which helps them in devising the right strategy. You can do online marketing for your brick-&-mortar stores. Get your hands on precious purchasing & customers’ preference data spread over the internet. You can glean this information from social media channels, websites, & through email campaigns. You can definitely work on the information collected online to tune up your in-store experience.
Tip No 4: Optimize inventory management
Many marketing activities directly or indirectly depend on the right inventory management for their success. Best Business Intelligence Cloud Software which are proving to be successful in turn arounds are capable of sourcing data from multiple channels like POS, warehouse management system, ERPs & others to analyze it & provide right information to make intelligent business decisions which prevent stock out & other unwanted situations. They also help you to predict future product requirements to plan inventory stocking. As far as inventory management is concerned, this is how BI tools help:
- They help to optimize supply to prevent stock outs
- Managing inventory distribution across stores
- Plan & phase out low-selling SKUs
- Create inventory forecasts based on sales & stock data
This is how business intelligence tools help in inventory management by creating & executing inventory strategies which help in meeting sales targets.
Conclusion
There is a considerable pressure on brick-&-mortar companies to perform from online stores. In order to bring to life your sales aspirations & to create a sustainable market expansion strategy one will have to overcome the key challenges of today’s retailing & create a conductive customer experience. Today’s technology helps you to do that – WovVBI from WovV Technologies which we mentioned above in the blog is cloud-based, SaaS modelled BI software which is just fit for the retailers to win the retail game by intelligent decision making. WovVBI business intelligence features are really worth it. Late starters may be at disadvantage so get on board today. And one more thing before I wind up, this tool is available in FREE-FOREVER format, so contact us today to get it for free for always.
