Many business owners simply feel that looking at their business based off of transactions completed is enough information to make them successful. Although sales data is important; there are additional avenues that can further enhance your business’s success. One of these steps is Customer Counting. In using customer counting correctly, you can actually take all the foot traffic near your store and get an educated estimation from the “non-customers” and what the true scale of opportunity at your location is. There are a few main ways of acquiring and utilizing this information.
Staff Scheduling and Resourcing
In almost any retail environment, staff is the most critical cost in business. But judging your staff scheduling simply by sales patterns may be a wasted opportunity. Those customers who make it to the register do not accurately represent the true volume of possible consumers passing through the store. One step to alleviate the problem is looking at the "Footfall" data to better establish a more complete graph of in-store activity and service demand levels. This can lead to improved resourcing, less costly downtime, and improved customer service.
Motivating Your Staff
Certain tools such as setting targets and incentives can provide powerful profit-increasing steps to make your employees and ultimately your business increase its potential customers. In essence, motivated employees play a major part in driving sales in the store. Being able to measure performance makes target setting even more accurate, effective, and yield better results. One of the strongest growing metrics in motivating employees is Conversion Rates (The percentage of shoppers who make purchases), primarily because this is something that is directly in your employees control to influence. Employees who are educated on the product and are eager to assist their next customer can easily turn browsers into buyers. Rewarding or “Incentivizing” this behavior is one way you can make the staff work that much harder at getting those conversion rates UP!
Analyzing Your Business’s Portfolio
In this current day and age, it has never been more important to analyze and plan. Every day we hear of store sales declining and online shopping becoming the new maverick in retail. But now there is worry that this type of “out of sight, out of mind” mentality may actually cause the digital sales to inevitably drop because people will not be “Physically” reminded of said businesses or products that they would normally buy online, because the actual brick and mortar is no longer there to “remind” them. So having a strong physical presence can actually lead to better digital sales and vice versa, so having strong foot traffic tracking and “Customer Counting” those who see you every day could ultimately help you in both regards.
Marketing Efficiency
So you just ran a new marketing campaign and want to know how successful it was. Well in the case of a “Coupon Campaign” or “Discount Campaign” or even a “Give-Away Campaign”, there is a chance that Sales Tracking will not exactly yield the most accurate information for you to know if your campaign was a success. Your sales numbers may be very similar to the previous month (because of the discounts offered during the campaign) however, you had 2x as many people purchasing from you. Customer Counting is a good way for you to keep track of this information and convert it into useful information to make sure that your next campaign is just as or perhaps even more, successful.
Denison, Tim. (2016, June 2) Top 5 values of customer counting. Retrieved from
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