Dozens, if not hundreds of marketing studies confirm that when a business provides a positive experience for its customers, those customers tend to return and buy more often. That’s more than just customer loyalty – it means they spend more. In fact, studies show that customer spending increases by 40% when their experience is positive.
Retailers also know that attracting an all-new customer is a lot more expensive than converting a captured customer into a repeat buyer. It squeezes more “lifetime value” out of each buyer. It means business owners can spend less money on advertising to find cold prospects with the goal of converting them into first-time buyers.
That’s why collecting data on who is coming into a store and finding out as much as possible about their buying behavior is critical. And that’s where a technology sometimes referred to as “people counting” comes into play.
People counting is more than about just “counting heads.” It has developed into a complex science in recent years. Instrument and software-driven methods of capturing customer patterns, buying habits, behaviors, preferences and more into data bases that can be analyzed is an invaluable method for increasing profits and building brand loyalty.
Some of the processes are real-time customer behavior monitoring, system auditing and remote system management. Data collected can be hosted on cloud-based intelligence platforms to allow for integration of even more useful business information sets.
Once data is collected, data mining and analysis can provide useful ideas on how to make customers happier, make them spend more money and keep them coming back. Some example of people counting instruments are thermal, stereo and mono people counters. Others are time-of-flight and Wi-Fi people counters.
People counting is useful across and array of industries beyond retail. For example, nonprofits, such as libraries and museums, are finding this technology useful in enhancing patron experience which keeps public support for these institutions strong.
