Why online retail grow faster than ever in the history? Set aside from the factor of purchasing power has increase drastically after the .com booming and others, the technologies are the main reasons why online retails grow tremendously faster than normal retail.

Online behavioural tracking as usual you have know what those big corporates are doing on all the tech devices that you are using – collecting data.

Read more:
https://www.bravonet.my/2018/05/13/is-google-always-listening-to-you/
https://www.bravonet.my/2018/02/28/social-media-are-stealing-from-you/

Today, the coverage of data collection or i should say “surveillance” has been extended to physical’s world. Footfall tracking isn’t something new in the market, but for most of the consumers, especially in South East Asia this is particularly stranger to them. Surprisingly there are some malls and stores operators didn’t know these as well.

Footfall analytics is the analysis of how people use physical spaces via WiFi or camera technologies. With the “offline” tracking, stores and malls owners will have better understanding and more insight data on their customers.

Traditionally, stores promotions are base on assumption to start a campaign in order to drive sales or other purposes, the amount of money that pour into the campaign is like buying lottery whereby most of them hope that it will hit its jackpot.  Today we’ve more solid data to determine what kind of campaign we should run, with the information, marketers are able to the plan better and cost effective campaigns to reach their goals, this approach is for more efficient when it goes into e-commerce marketing. What if is a brick store? The data they have are relative limited therefore the campaigns for brick store is relative higher cost and inefficient.

Footfall tracking comes in various form, from laser beams, cameras, thermal imaging cameras, Wifi, Bluetooth to GPS, all of which are used to measure people movement.

How Footfall help malls?

Recruiting the right merchants into the mall.

With footfall, you are able to know the gender of your customers in the mall and also the spending of each of them as well. With the data of knowing which type of merchandises most of the customers would likely to go to, malls operator are to invite and place the right retail stores in their mall.

Adjust the rental accordingly via the heat map.

Heat map is particularly widely use in e-commerce store where by you will be easily know you visitors that came to your website land and exit on which pages, clicked which links, and stay how long for which sections in a page. With footfall, you can do it easily as well. Good news for malls operator, today, they will know which areas of the malls has the highest heat, and therefore adjust the rental via the data.

Read more: https://behavioranalyticsretail.com/in-store-customer-journey/

How Footfall help individual store owners?

Most of the individual retail business owners rarely consider to use tech to as and aid in their business (at least from what i’ve seen in the Malaysia’s retail market).

Let’s take an example for F&B businesses, would you like to know what’s your customers’ gender, age, spending power? With footfall, you are able to collect the precise data of table turnover, customers’ demographic, spending power, & your what’s your most ordered dishes. Many business owners may not know what to do with the data they have and this is the main reason why most of the retail business owners didn’t see it’s gold. Although some may argue the data size could be too small  to make it meaningful, but do bear in mind that footfall itself can extend its value towards customers’ relationship.

Imagine, if the customer that came to your stores visited you for several time and you can’t barely recognise him, if he didn’t show his loyalty card, you would never know he is one of the 20% high spender in your store. With the face recognition device that you’ve just installed in your store, the cashiers instantly identify this particular “VIP” customers, the cashiers could response accurately and personally to their customers.

With the cashierless store arise like Amazon Go or Alibaba Group, in one hand is has become a whole new level of convenient store (7-11 or Family Mart should really ) in another hand is another level of tracking your personal data as well. We saw many people embrace the technologies, very little concerning about the privacy (which we should), because this would be the next level of surveillance and data harvesting.

Technologies, the double edge swords, same goes with data. Using it correctly, it will benefits the people, in the other hand, it can be a disaster as well. Read more: https://www.bravonet.my/2019/09/16/when-hiring-gone-racist-when-people-dont-realised/