There was a point not too long ago when futurologists believed that all retail would be going online, with anonymous transactions and drone deliveries meaning you would never have to leave your couch to satisfy all your shopping needs. In fact, the opposite has happened. Brick and mortar retail stores have embraced and incorporated big data, cloud computing and the internet to deliver a much-improved retail experience for business owners and consumers alike.
When Jud and Julie Soderborg opened the fashion boutique Koan in New York’s East Village, they wanted to really understand the identity and the behaviors of the people who were walking by their store, and could be potential customers. So the husband and wife team initiated a three-day data gathering project using SAP’s Digital Consumer Insight tool. They began by focusing on when foot traffic peaked and when it was at its lowest, then dug deeper to find out where people were coming from, who they were in terms of age & gender and even what sort of devices these people were using.
When they collated all the data, they discovered that the foot traffic past their location was primarily millennials from the Williamsburg / East Village area who were using Apple devices. As a result Koan was able to shape their offerings accordingly and target their marketing tone to suit the foot traffic, confident that they were appealing to the correct demographic.
You can read more of their story, as well as many more use cases here: http://digital.sap.com/sap-digital-consumer-insight-case-studies-and-use-cases
E-commerce retailers have known for a long time who their customers are, due to their ability to track their clicks and their online behavior. SAP’s Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Becher explains, “This offering does to retail stores what Web marketing has done for websites.” For example, an online retailer can track the path to purchase, the time to taken to get there and the demographics of a consumer. “What we’ve done for the first time is to take all this information that people have figured out in the digital world, and make it available to the physical world.”
The benefit of these insights can be applied in a number of ways for retailers. Everything from proximity marketing to location planning, sales strategies and campaigns will benefit from the snapshots provided by SAP Digital Consumer Insight. Through the data, retailers are striving to achieve a way of delivering a consistent, personalized product mix to customers across multiple channels that local consumers will relate to. It stands to reason that the deeper the understanding of customer behavior that there is, the easier it becomes to attract loyalty and increase the conversion rate and average basket value of purchases.
Consumers need not fear that their privacy is being violated in any way. The data which is collected and presented via Digital Insights is anonymized and aggregated, thus giving the business owner a snapshot of the traffic in the area while maintaining the privacy of the individuals.
SAP built its formidable reputation working with big businesses, but 80% of their customers are small and mid-sized so the company learned how to take what works at enterprise-level and adapt it for smaller businesses that realize how much they can benefit from actionable information.
Small business owners don’t have the time, skills or resources to build complicated data analysis systems. SAP Digital Consumer Insight is the perfect vehicle to address those concerns. Consumers can simply purchase a single data ‘Insight’ for $439.00, or they can select a bundle of five data ‘Insights’ for $1,429.00 – and begin to see their Insights instantly.
Sponsored spotlight series by SAP
By Jeremy Daniel
