Introduction
Data fuels business intelligence to generate insights that help to understand past and present business operations and also predict future outcomes. One can get key insights from data to understand and predict customer needs. While we discuss the steps to use BI to boost in-store sales, we must understand the importance of mixing online and offline experiences to come out of just brick-and-mortar operations. It can be done by harnessing the power of BI and analytics. But you must be well-versed in the parameters for choosing the best bi-directional 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 and offline retail to create one single, joint retail environment. This promises to increase sales through better customer engagement. The best business intelligence solution has provisions for that. The strategy entails the 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 and analyze complete information about products, sales, customers, prices, and promotions to accurately understand and anticipate customer needs and use the right strategies to meet them. Here are some tips for increasing sales through BI:
Tip No. 1: Feed insights to educate and empower shop floor staff.
lThe best business intelligence solutions like WovVBI from WovV Technologies help sales teams enhance performance and build customer loyalty. Analysis of customers’ profiles and shopping histories captured through PoS and CRM applications and maintained in BI databases can reveal shoppers’ behavior and purchase preferences. The insights generated through these BI solutions can help sales representatives better understand customers’ interests, purchasing patterns, and shopping habits to guide customers toward in-store purchases through better recommendations. Nobody can deny the growth potential of online sales, but today they still account for around 20% of total retail sales. What could be the reason for that? While it’s true that logistics reasons in rural and 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 that customers get valuable in-store sales representatives’ advice while making in-store purchases. By increasing the possibility of capturing and analyzing in-store customers’ data, business intelligence and data analytics applications can help retailers capitalize on these strengths, which are inherent in only brick-and-mortar companies.
Tip No. 2 Create a personalized, pepped-up, and immersive customer experience.
Many recent surveys are pointing to one trend: offer a personalized experience to customers; that way, they will like to make 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 and helpful in securing continued growth. Structured and unstructured data have precious insights hidden underneath; you must have the ability to aggregate such data and process it to generate valuable information that will help in understanding, envisioning, and fulfilling customer needs. Business intelligence reporting makes it possible. Today, price is not the only factor that drives purchasing decisions; today’s customer has greater disposable income, pursues brand loyalty, is status conscious, is style conscious, and therefore looks for a curated shopping experience that fulfills their individual, personal choices. And this is not unachievable; if you are really customer-focused, there are many advanced technology-based business intelligence solutions that can help you with that. BI software has a provision for fine-grained funnel analysis, which provides intelligent information to help you review and improve customer engagement at a granular level—yes, for every interaction. Access to customers’ past purchasing data and the ability to work on this data to come up with valuable insights arm retailers to build strategies to win customers’ hearts with personalized, tailored experiences.
Tip No. 3: Create powerful, effective, and 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 that can be leveraged to create an effective retail marketing strategy. BI platforms provide answers to the key questions, which can help shape the right marketing strategy and also improve the KPIs. Some of these questions are:
- Which products are hot sellers?
- What is the shoppers demographic?
- What is the comparative store performance?
- What are the hidden trends in the sale of products that can be of interest to us?
Businesses that capitalize on business intelligence tools are capable and confident in making very effective marketing strategies as they get a piercing view of customer data, which helps them devise the right strategy. You can do online marketing for your brick-and-mortar stores. Get your hands on precious purchasing and customer preference data spread over the internet. You can glean this information from social media channels, websites, and email campaigns. You can definitely use 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. The best business intelligence cloud software, which is proving to be successful in turnarounds, is capable of sourcing data from multiple channels like POS, warehouse management systems, ERPs, and others to analyze it and provide the right information to make intelligent business decisions that prevent stockouts and other unwanted situations. They also help you predict future product requirements to plan inventory stocking.
As far as inventory management is concerned, this is how BI tools help:
- They help optimize supply to prevent stockouts.
- Managing inventory distribution across stores
- Plan and phase out low-selling SKUs.
- Create inventory forecasts based on sales and stock data.
This is how business intelligence tools help in inventory management by creating and executing inventory strategies that help in meeting sales targets.
Conclusion
There is considerable pressure on brick-and-mortar companies to compete with online stores. In order to bring to life your sales aspirations and create a sustainable market expansion strategy, one will have to overcome the key challenges of today’s retailing and 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-based BI software that is just right for retailers to win the retail game through intelligent decision-making. WovVBI’s business intelligence features are really worth it. Late starters may be at a disadvantage, so get on board today.
