Tapping into Big Data can help retailers do more of what works and less of what doesn’t so they can improve their retail store sales, according to Small Business Trends magazine. Here are some ways you can use Big Data to improve your retail sales:
Sales Receipts/Point-of-Sale Records
You can use data from your point of sales system and sales receipts to make the appropriate staffing decisions, or modify your opening and closing times.
For instance, if sales are slow on Mondays and Tuesdays, but your business really picks up on the weekend, you can schedule more employees to work on Saturdays and Sundays.
Additionally, if your store opens at 9 a.m., but customers really don’t start coming in until 10 a.m., you should think about opening an hour later, or at least scheduling fewer workers from 9 a.m. until 10 a.m.
Inventory Tracking
The data from your inventory tracking system can tell you which products are flying off your shelves, when you have to reorder, how much of a certain item you should keep on hand, and which products should be heavily discounted because they’re out of season like sandals and shorts in mid-December.
Website Analytics
Using website analytics, you can determine how your customers learn about your store—in other words, which websites are driving traffic, as well as what those customers do once they’re on your site.
Knowing the biggest sources of traffic (e.g., social media) can help you figure out where to spend your time and your marketing dollars. For example, if 85 percent of your traffic comes from Facebook, that’s where you should focus your advertising.
Email Marketing Analytics
Email remains a very profitable channel to market to your customers. But it’s not enough to just have an email marketing program—you have to measure how it’s doing.
That means examining your analytics to determine, for instance, the number of people who open your emails as well as how many times your emails are opened. If your emails aren’t being opened very often, maybe it’s time to come up with more compelling subject lines. You could also try sending your emails at different times of the day (e.g., at 9 a.m. instead of 3 p.m.) or different days of the week.
Taking the time to analyze all the Big Data your retail store generates can help you figure out the best ways to kick your sales up a notch.
