Experience holds up its coefficients such as IQ and EQ but mapping them out is a retailer's task dependent on a retail design agency.
How much does the consumer ingest them? Can you calculate that ingestion?
Yes, for sure. Heat Map Analysis is a technique infused with closed circuits placed on the top corners of the store that provides retail analytics for the consumer footfall and consumer behavior. Before the in-store experience, we have to understand the footfall analysis:
The Old Way – Deploying an employee at the entrance with a customer counter equipped with a manual clicker to track the number of visitors entering the store.
The New Way – New systems involve video cameras (CCTV’s), thermal imaging, infrared beams, and facial profiling help retailers to keep the track of the consumers visiting the store i.e consumer tracking through in-store heat mapping.
Benefits
- Helps in determining in-store activity
- Staff-scheduling according to footfall
- Guides in improving store layout design
- Boost ROI
- Predictive analysis helps in improvising marketing techniques
- Operational changes like – shifting fixtures to the area where there is more consumer footfall
- Help in discovering best performing hours
- Measures performance in comparison to competitors
In a nutshell, heat map enabled stores have an upper hand over other stores,they can optimize their in-store experience more efficiently.
Not only in brick-and-mortars, we can also calculate consumer behavior through heat mapping on digital platforms. Commonly used on e-commerce websites and service delivering websites. Deep insights help them to determine at which page and section the consumer is visiting the most. Footfall attribution is calculated from data generated from both mobile marketing techniques, campaign impressions and actual store visits. Mostly, businesses like restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, and clothing stores use this technique to measure their conversions.
Need of Footfall Attribution
As digital measurement metrics are not accurate most of the time in calculating marketing performance of a store, retailers who rely only on online figures possess a chance to miss out the real-time analytics. And if the marketing decisions and strategies have a faulty basis, businesses get impacted negatively.
WIth evolving shopping patterns and behaviors, technologies like AR, VR, and AI are making a lot of friction and gaining attractions. This evolution should be understood as the modern omnichannel consumers are preferring both online and offline experiences. Therefore, footfall attribution is much needed for performance and ROI (success) in bringing traffic to brick and mortars via digital marketing.
Measuring Footfall Attribution
According to uplift and visit rates, footfall attribution benchmarks help in ranking the campaigns.
Key metrics to measure are –
- Uplift Rate (U.R):- By U.R, we can know the effectiveness of an ad and the interest it has generated among the consumers. Segmenting customers into categories “Who Visited” and “Who Left” helps us in finding uplift rate.
- Visit Rate (V.R):- Segmented into categories of demographics and buying behavior helps in calculating visit rate (V.R) as the average number of people by category at a specific period.
Concluding in an abstract manner, in-store experience differs from customer to customer as every person perceives it in a different manner. Driven by branding strategies deployed by marketers, visual merchandising placed, and different types of signages. Not only in stores, experience can be driven from outside too, like from OOH Advertising to outdoor AR window displays. Heat map techniques are also used in clever ways with marketing strategies laced with proper research to capture consumer behavior and their psyche. Dropped under retail audit services, agencies use these techs to help these retail stores in driving consumers, in an either way of B2B as their B2C’s.
