In an increasingly competitive marketplace most retail businesses are feeling the squeeze of rising costs and decreasing margins. To measure the effectiveness of marketing and staffing dollars, some retailers are now using a number of people counting technologies. By understanding the efficacy of their spend, retailers are able to tweak their marketing campaigns and staff rosters to maximise their allocation of funds.
Sales and marketing departments are making use of people counting technology to assess the tangible success of marketing campaigns. Not only are they able to assess the potency of media campaigns and marketing collateral, but they can also measure the effects of their visual merchandising by monitoring the number of people who walk into their store compared to those who walk past their stores. Visual merchandisers can then refine their shop front or store layouts by continually assessing the percentage of people “peeling off” into the store and adjusting their shop front or store layout accordingly.
Marketing managers or store managers are also using these statistics to evaluate sales conversions. Management is able to identify the business’s strengths and weaknesses by assessing how many customers entering the store actually make a purchase and how much they spend. If sales conversions are low, managers will be prompted to investigate the variables that may be affecting low conversion rates, whether it relates to the ability of staff to sell and up-sell, pricing or the presentation of merchandise.
Store managers are also using people counting tools to effectively roster staff so stores are well covered during peak periods and valuable money isn’t wasted during quieter times. Not only are managers experiencing cost benefits from efficient rosters, but most are seeing vast improvements in customer satisfaction.
Proper use of people counting products can be an accurate way to identify daily, monthly, seasonal and annual trends in customer visitations, sales conversions and a great way to ascertain the timing of marketing campaigns.
There are a number of people counting solutions available in the marketplace today. Each solution has a trade off of cost versus quality of results. People counters which give a total count at the end of the day are the simplest and cheapest method of gaining tangible data to provide businesses with their basic information requirements.
TCS Instruments offers the Model 2C which is a relatively inexpensive product that will provide basic information required for assessing store traffic on a day to day basis. The value of the data returned from the Model 2C is dependant on the volume of pedestrian traffic. Low traffic volumes give a very accurate result. High volumes are generally less accurate, however this level of inaccuracy will be uniform over time, so it’s quite easy to gain a clear-cut picture of customer traffic patterns over an extended period.
The industry’s “Rolls Royce” is the Orbit III camera from ShopperTrak in the USA. This vision-based product is capable of counting incoming and outgoing traffic without missing people in high density situations. The data is time stamped and stored in a database for future analysis and reporting. ShopperTrak has representation in USA, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Dubai (UAE), Japan, Taiwan and the UK. This device and others like it are more expensive but the results are extremely accurate and can be broken down into precise time intervals.
There is a myriad of other people counting solutions available from local and international providers. If you’re in the market for one of these products, check to see whether it has a distributor in Australia. If it does, find out how long the product has been in Australia and how large the company’s customer base is. If it doesn’t, you should be aware that many international providers have unsuccessfully attempted to enter the Australian market. If the company fails, you could be caught with an invalid warranty and no support.
Australia has two major players and a number of smaller scale solution providers. Many focus on a particular technology or market sector. Some appoint agents to make the sales. Others do everything in-house, whether by use of staff or sub-contractors. When selecting the people counting solution that fits your business, it is important to examine the intended supplier’s products, services and company structure.
Questions that you should consider when making this decision include:
- Does the supplier do the installations?
- Who will support you if there are problems?
- Is there an ongoing license or upgrade fee for the software?
- Is there an ongoing support fee just for them to help you in times of need?
Shop around. Ask for references. Learn the technology. You’ll find a little insight goes a long way.
