Effective marketing programs depend on concrete, factual feedback.  Traditionally when it comes to measuring promotional and store merchandising programs, the available feedback has been very limited.  While it’s been possible to measure actual sales results, being blind to the full path to purchase has cost retailers many opportunities to fully maximize ROI.  By understanding the path to purchase more completely, you gain deeper insight into why campaigns are effective or not, making more efficient marketing programs possible.

For example, an effective marketing campaign might increase sales by driving more shoppers into the store (traffic goes up and conversion remains flat), by causing existing shopper traffic to purchase more often (traffic remains flat and conversion goes up), or by causing shoppers to buy a greater number of items or more expensive items (traffic and conversion remain flat and Average Transaction Value goes up).  Or any combination of the three.  Each of these scenarios highlights a different success driver in the marketing campaign that you could identify and reproduce for future success.

Employing comprehensive analytics in your stores gives you the opportunity to scrutinize your staffing decisions and optimize them for maximum sales and cost efficiency.  By integrating directly with your staffing or time & attendance system, RetailNext can clearly and intuitively reveal where you’re understaffed, where you’re overstaffed, and how to shift resources around to get more out of the budget you already spend.  Merchants have used the intelligence gathered from RetailNext to optimize existing staff hours to yield sales increases between 3% and 8%, all with no budgetary increase.  You can also go a step further with RetailNext and identify opportunities for additional staffing investment that are expected to result in higher conversion rates and positive ROI.  And larger stores can use the system to compare staffing and conversion within departments, floors, or areas of the store, shifting sales personnel to the sections where they do the most good

RetailNext also gives you closer visibility on individual employee performance than ever before.  For each sales person and cashier in the enterprise you can track sales, conversion, number of items sold, and many other KPIs.  Use Wi-Fi employee tags to map Measure performance for store and regional managers by collecting metrics for any time period and comparing to average benchmarks for your chain.

Features

• Integrates with all popular workforce management (WFM), staffing, and time & attendance systems
• Automatic calculation of conversion rate, transaction count, total sales, average transaction value, average number of items, and more – by hour, day, week, day of week, month, or other time periods
• Configurable staffing reports straight to your inbox
• Automatic highlighting of KPI outliers in your reports
• Detailed individual employee performance statistics

One of the key information sources that RetailNext can use for its analysis of your stores is the point-of-sale (POS) system.  RetailNext can take data directly from all popular POS systems to power a variety of analytics operations, including full-featured exception reporting.

Because RetailNext integrates your transaction data with other sources, the platform offers powerful capabilities that are beyond the norm for POS exception reporting systems.  And by combining this capability with other necessary in-store functions like traffic counting and loss prevention video systems, you can realize extreme savings in capital expenditures and ongoing service and maintenance.

Features

• Comprehensive view of all POS transactions
• Sorting and searching by time period, transaction type, amount, number of items, payment type, cashier, sales associate, SKU, exception type, and more
• One-click access to full basket information for every transaction
• Instantly viewable video of all transactions
• Automatic, customizable exception reports sent to your inbox
• Instant alerts based on predefined criteria
• Integration with third-party messaging and alerting systems
• Web-based console with credential-controlled access available from anywhere
• Mobile access to transaction queries and video through iOS and Android devices

So you can bring shoppers to your stores.  You can offer them the products they want at the prices they require.  You can maximize customer service on the sales floor while minimizing theft.  All these capabilities are great assets, but you can still lose your customers if they have to wait too long in line to make a purchase.

RetailNext’s comprehensive in-store analytics capabilities enable you to investigate your shopping queues and employee schedules to minimize wait times and the staffing hours required.  By comparing traffic, conversion, sales, and staffing levels for specific time periods, RetailNext enables you to identify which shopping queues are working well and which may be preventing sales through overlong wait times.  And it helps determine when extra staffing will not affect conversion so that you can save on unnecessary investments in these time frames.

Features

• Integrates with all popular workforce management (WFM), staffing, and time & attendance systems
• Automatic calculation of conversion rate, transaction count, total sales, average transaction value, average number of items, and more – by hour, day, week, day of week, month or other time periods
• Configurable staffing reports straight to your inbox
• Automatic highlighting of KPI outliers in your reports
• Ability to measure relative usage of different registers per time period and identify likely opportunities for conversion improvement
• Heat maps available to visually convey activity around your shopping queues at various time periods

No more guesswork.  Introducing a state-of-art research system that enables retailers and CPG marketers to see and analyze in-store shopper behavior, in real time.

Are shoppers engaged with your brand?  Is the offer working?  Does off-shelf outperform on-shelf?  Does location drive ROI? Which message sells best?  Are out-of-stocks getting out of hand? How is shrink affecting revenue?  Now you know.  And you can take immediate action.

RetailNext Learning Labs (formerly known as ShopperGauge) provides live, unbiased, actionable data – unlike research techniques that rely on surveys, focus groups, projections and shop-alongs.  Finally, you can measure what really works with your shoppers.  So you can respond better and increase your profits.

RetailNext Learning Labs provides access to real stores for manufacturer testing.  A matched panel of test and control stores in select retailers has been outfitted with RetailNext technology and is available for immediate access to live in-store shopper data by category, brand, aisle, endcap, and more.  All insights are tied to POS data for deep granularity of traffic flow and conversion analysis at every step along the path to purchase.

Manufacturers can engage in four-week testing periods where they can introduce new fixtures, display approaches, messaging, and packaging or even change store location for certain products to understand shopper impact.  Manufacturers can also immediately gain access to baseline data on how shoppers shop their category and brands.