This is a guest blog from Dor, the world’s first battery-operated thermal-sensing people counter that can tell you your store’s conversion rate. You can increase your revenue by 10% with just a 1% increase in your conversion rate. Learn more.
If you’re a retailer looking to ensure the continuity of your success, you know you have to make use of data to ensure that success—but you may not know where to start.
After all, there are numerous data points that can be tracked for any business, so how do you know which one will serve you best? We’re here to suggest that your retail conversion rate is one of the most important factors that affects the success of your business. Read on to find out why your store conversion rate matters and how you can improve it at your own retailer.
What’s the Retail Conversion Rate?
Retail conversion rate is one of the many factors that determine the success of a business. For those who may be unfamiliar with the concept, the retail conversion rate is the percentage of store visitors who make a purchase from your retailer during a specific timeframe.
Retail conversion rate can be calculated using a simple formula: number of sales / total number of store visitors x 100. So, if you’re a retailer whose store drew in 500 people over the course of a weekend, and 200 of those store visitors made a purchase, your retail conversion rate for the weekend would be 200 / 500 x 100 = 40%. In other words, 4 out of 10 people who visited your store bought something, which is a pretty impressive conversion rate for just about any retailer.
Why is it Important to Measure Retail Conversion Rate?
Retail conversion rate is one of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for any brick-and-mortar store, as it tells you how many potential shoppers you were able to convert into customers.
This information provides much-needed context for how well your store is performing over a specific timeframe. After all, if we go back to the example above, having 200 customers over the weekend will only tell you part of the story. But without knowing whether your total number of store visitors was 500 or 5,000, you would not be able to contextualize the sales figures.
Your retail conversion rate can be used to refine a number of decisions you make about your business. If you find that you get more store visitors during a certain time, you could adjust your staff scheduling to ensure you have enough employees on the floor to assist your customers, thus boosting your retail conversion rate. On the other hand, if you find that staffing has little to no effect on your conversion rate, you can focus on making other adjustments through your store—say, with your window displays, or even your inventory—in an effort to increase the conversion rate.
How Retailers Can Measure Their Conversion Rate
Any retailer who wants to measure the conversion rate for their store will first have to know how many people visit the store on any given day, which is only possible if they use a retail people counter.
Retail people counters are devices that measure and track in-store foot traffic. There are a variety of people counting solutions available on the market today, but to measure conversion rate accurately and easily, it’s best to choose one that integrates with your store’s point-of-sale (POS) device.
When it comes to foot traffic counters, thermal people counters are an effective solution that comes with the advantage of protecting customer privacy, as there is no filming of store visitors. Dor’s thermal sensors deserve a mention here: not only do they employ machine-learning algorithms that improve over time, but they are also easy-to-install, battery-operated devices—meaning you can set up your sensor, integrate it with your POS, and start measuring retail conversion rate (among many other KPIs) in just a matter of minutes.
5 Tactics to Increase In-Store Conversion Rate
While each store’s conversion rate targets will depend on the specifics of said store, there are a few things that any retailer can start doing to boost their in-store conversion rate today:
1. Use Customer Emails to Drive Traffic to Your Store
Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer without an eCommerce platform, you still likely use one form of digital marketing: customer emails. Today, many businesses are opting to go paperless with their receipts, emailing them to customers instead. If you haven’t already done so, you can adopt a similar approach at your retailer to collect customer emails, then use your database of customer emails to draw people to your store.
One of the easiest digital marketing campaigns for retailers to undertake is to offer digital promo codes via email that can only be used in-store, thereby driving more traffic to your store and potentially increasing your in-store conversion rate.
2. Harness the Power of Social Media
While we’re on the subject of digital marketing, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the importance of using your brand’s social media channels wisely. It’s been proven time and again that sharing attractive images of your inventory and your store will make customers want to interact with your brand, and customers will be more likely to want to visit your store when they feel they “know” your brand.
Once you’ve amassed a large enough following, you can even do giveaways for store credit, or gift cards and coupons to be used in-store only.
3. Train Your Staff to Provide Superb Customer Service
Customer satisfaction is key to the success of any retailer—and any retailer worth their salt knows that employees are the most important asset when it comes to achieving excellent customer service. By training your staff to always be responsive to customer needs and assist them with a smile, you have a chance to turn even the most reluctant customer into a lifelong brand ambassador.
4. Utilize Data to Perfect Your Stocking and Inventory
If you’re using a smart POS device to measure retail conversion rate, you can track sales data over days, weeks, or even months to discover what people are buying the most, then offer more of that. With this information at hand, you can even diversify your inventory to offer complementary products to customers—thus increasing their Average Transaction Value (ATV), or the amount customers spend per purchase.
5. Streamline Your Checkout to Prevent Long Lines
If you’re looking to entice people to browse through your store and make a purchase, you’ll want to prevent long lines of people from forming at checkout, as this view may turn off potential customers from even entering your store. The easiest way to do this is to invest in mobile POS devices that allow customers to do contactless payments via credit cards or smartphones. If that’s not feasible for your business, placing checkout counters at the store’s rear is another simple approach that can make a world of visual difference.
Data is integral to the success of any retailer – online or in-store. Tracking KPIs like retail conversion rates can help guide your business to further success.