Someone once said hope is not a strategy. This is quite true. While you could build your business and hope for the best, it should not be your plan of action. For instance, you can’t build a product, rent a warehouse to stock your inventory, hire staff, create a marketing campaign, then sit and hope customers would come buy from you. Neither can you rent an office space and offer a service you ‘think’ or hope people will need.
The point is, profitable businesses are not built on assumptions. You can’t guess your way into high revenue. And do you know why? It’s because you can’t quantify or measure an assumption. Assumptions could make sense to the mind but they are difficult to work with in the real world. You cannot accurately predict the outcome of guesswork. And with limited resources, it is wasteful to build your business around hope or assumptions.
So what do you need to build a profitable business? The answer is a four letter word.
Data Beats Assumption, Every Time
Data is that four letter word. Every profitable business you know runs on a good deal of data. Over the years, online businesses have had it better. Their platform made it easy for them to easily collect, store, and use customer information. Brick n’ mortar stores were left to use methods such as paper surveys and POS data. While these methods could gather data, they weren’t adequate or even an accurate representation of the customers’ needs.
However, the game has changed for offline businesses. With the advent of Wi-Fi analytics and marketing softwares, brick n’ mortar now have the tool they need to collect customer data. To make smarter business decisions, organize your operations, reduce wastage, and increase profit you need a Wi-Fi analytics platform. Just as the CIA needs intelligence to curb crime effectively, so also businesses need intelligence to stay profitable.
Next, we are going to look at…
How It All Works
When we say data, it could mean a thousand things. But in this instance we mean customer data. If you already have a good guest Wi-Fi system in place, it recognizes every customer that walks into your place of business using their mobile phones. This data is used to create a profile of each customer with parameters such as age, gender, name, social media handle, etc.
Integrating your guest Wi-Fi with an analytics platform, you can record their activities and behaviour whenever they are within your business premises. These behaviours include length of time they spend on site and what items they buy. In addition to data from your POS system, you can create a robust customer profile.
Using Customer Profile for Marketing
When you have created a profile for all your customers, you can put them unto separate groups using similar behaviours or preferences. Possible groups could include regular shoppers, big spenders, dormant customers, weekend shoppers, window shoppers, and many more.
Having this information in hand, you can design a marketing campaign that targets a specific segment. For example, if you have a segment with customers who do not spend much, say one item per visit, you could offer them a buy-two-get-half-off coupon. Using a Wi-Fi analytics & marketing platform, you can track the outcome of your campaign to see if the minimal spenders are buying more.
Using Customer Profile as a Crystal Ball
Every business experiences highs and lows. There periods of high customer influx and period when there is a drop in customer visits. This is normal. The question is, do you know what’s causing the lull in customer visits? Could your competition be offering something your customers want that you aren’t? Or your first-time customers aren’t converting to regular customers? Or your regular customers are visiting less, maybe because of a drop in your customer service? If you do not find out the cause, you may not know what to do to change it and may go out of business.
This is where adequate data comes in. Using the data collected with the Wi-Fi analytics platform, you can measure your customer churn rate. You can see which customer segments recorded the most decrease and then prepare marketing strategies to get the numbers back up.
Business intelligence helps you to be better prepared to handle changes in customer buying behaviour. The data gives you the power to bend any situation in your favour. This way, you are always on top of things.
Wi-Fi analytics and marketing platforms like Spotonwifi makes gathering business intelligence a walk in the park. You can integrate our platform with your guest Wi-Fi and POS system to collect valuable visitor data. The data is stored and easily accessible from any mobile device. To see how it works, request a free demo or contact us to see how our product can help you know your customers better.
POSTED ON August 6, 2019Share:
