So, you want to drive more in-store traffic to your business. Who doesn't? With enough hard work and steady revenue increases, you might be able expand your workforce and even your physical footprint.
Luckily, there is no shortage of advice for business owners looking to attract new customers. Perhaps you'll rearrange your shelves and aisles to emphasize products that are in high demand. You might want to aggressively cut the prices of certain items to get people in the door. A strong social media presence could also go a long way to keeping your customer base informed about special offers and promotions.
No matter which strategy you choose, the key to making it work — and building on the most successful aspects of your business — is to collect the right data and use it to inform your decisions.
How Do I Tell Which Categories Are Driving Growth?
Collecting, processing, analyzing and using data on your retail operation is not easy.
As Michael J. Mauboussin writes in the Harvard Business Review, the most useful statistics are persistent and predictive. In other words, they show that similar actions will have similar outcomes, and, just as important, they can be used to predict an outcome based on an action.
So, for instance, if moving shelves closer to the cash register causes sales to rise consistently, this is evidence that similar actions are causing similar results. That information can then be used to make future predictions.
It can also be used to work backward. If sales of a particular product are rising, could it be because of a particular choice you made? Or is it the result of an outside force, such as changing consumer tastes?
SO, which is it? That's the challenging part. Once businesses start collecting hundreds and even thousands of data points, they find themselves with an increasingly complicated picture of how they operate each day. They need to be able to collect the right data, and use it to answer the right questions.
Determining which aspects of the business are driving growth requires a system that can collect all of this relevant, impactful data and organize it in such a way that can deliver actionable insights. Interactive Edge offers a number of creative ways to get the most out of your data. Check out the rest of our website to learn more about the services we offer to our clients.
