In 2005, Google Analytics was born. This software was designed to let an online or e-commerce site know everything about their customers' online behavior. This service was so popular that Google had to adopt a lottery-style invitation system until demand could be met.
Suddenly, businesses were provided with transformative data. They could understand every small aspect of a customer's interaction with their website and drive marketing and customer experience interactions based on this data.
14 years later... physical venues are still data black holes. It is clear that this needs to change. For brick-and-mortar stores to make a comeback, new and exciting technologies and ideas need to be implemented in venues to close the gap between the abundance of online analytics and the lack of data in venues.
Below are my thoughts on five of the best ways to capture in-store personal data:
- Station a person at the door who does not let anyone enter the venue until they fill out a form with multiple questions.
- Pros - Captures a rich set of data that allows you to know everything about the person entering the store.
- Cons - Prevents almost all customers from ever returning.
- Ask everyone in the store to fill out a survey before being served.
- Pros - Ensures a good, deep level of data capture.
- Cons - Can create long queues and potential arguments at the tills, especially on hot, busy days.
- Station a spy inside the store who makes a 'best guess' of customers' age and gender and notes them down on a sheet.
- Pros - Less intrusive than the first two methods.
- Cons - Loss of data when the spy takes their lunch.
- Ask all customers to attach a small paint pot with a hole to their belt. The use of different colored paint will allow you to track customer movements around the store.
- Pros - Helps map the store's 'hot or not' spots by analyzing the paint marks.
- Cons - Can damage customers' shoes.
- Use your store WiFi to easily and effectively collect and report on a rich range of customer data, including visitor numbers, visit times, type of device used, time spent on site, customer path around the store, gender, age, email address, and more.
- Pros - Easy to enable using your existing infrastructure, low cost, and almost immediate ROI.
- Cons - If you are not already doing this, your competitors certainly are.
As you will understand, points one to four were just for humor, but point five is available right now.
Help brick-and-mortar make a comeback and enrich your CRM with the kind of data that e-commerce sites have enjoyed for years. Contact us to learn more.
To model the potential ROI of collecting customer contact details in your store, use our free WiFi marketing ROI calculator .
