Blog

How IoT can take brick-and-mortar stores beyond physical dimensions

Lee Davies, marketing manager for www.wireless-sensors.co.uk, offers up insight on how retailers can gain large tracts of information about customers when they shop in person and utilize IoT to fine tune retail space in real-time.

Photo by iStock.com

June 11, 2019

By Lee Davies, marketing manager, www.wireless-sensors.co.uk

A customer walking into a brick-and-mortar retail store to make a purchase probably isn't thinking much about the Internet, but for the company getting their business, the exact opposite should be true.

Thanks to the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), retailers can gain large tracts of information about their customers when they shop in person. They can also utilize the IoT to fine tune their retail space in real-time, making it as comfortable and pleasant for customers as possible to add to the possibility of generating sales.

IoT for marketing and sales

IoT sensors can be used throughout a retail store to find out what your customers are looking for, what they are buying, as well as certain demographics that can power future marketing and advertising decisions.

It can begin with a simple sensor by the front door of your establishment that is capable of pinging what sort of smartphone each customer is carrying. If a person has used their smartphone to search for your store's location online, your website will be able to match that search by device as well and see what avenue it came from: Social media? Google search? Yelp review? This data can be analyzed and used to make decisions on how to market your business in the future using techniques including email segmentation and content personalization.

Content personalization comes from combining retail data such as what a person searched for online, what they bought, what they might have left in an abandoned online cart, with more basic demographics like their sex, geographic location, age, and spending habits. These can be sorted to generate a marketing persona that best describes how that customer likes acquiring information about your store and products; how often they spend money on new products; and what their specific needs are.

IoT sensors for marketing aren't limited to the front door, however. Sensors can be placed throughout the store to see how far in a consumer ventures, also by pinging their smartphone to gain their location in the store. Combining this data with what items each customer purchases can give management a great idea of what items are selling the best at the physical location relative to how items are arranged in the store.

For instance, if a certain type of handbag has gained viral acclaim because a celebrity raved about it on Twitter, purse enthusiasts might be flocking to your store in search of it. Consumers in the 21st century are expecting stores to be aware of trends basically as they happen, and would likely expect the handbag to be displayed front and center as they enter the store.

The diligent among them will either ask for the handbag's location from an employee or explore the space until they find what they're looking for. However, why make them work for it? IoT sensors that are connecting the increased sales of the handbag with consumers walking laps around the store in search for them can generate insight that this particular item needs more prominent placement. Managers could have the handbag moved to the most forward-facing center display and watch revenue zoom up as a result.

IoT for in-store environment

It's not all just about the product when you shop in person; feeling comfortable in the brick-and-mortar store can have an effect on how consumers act. If you've ever gone shopping on a Black Friday, you know that the throngs of hyped shoppers can create a frenzy. At times like these, who on your staff remembers a little thing like the thermostat?

It might be at 72 degrees for a normal business day, but when the Black Friday rush storms through the door, all of that extra body heat will spike the temperature. When 72 degrees becomes 78 degrees, shoppers get overheated. Uncomfortable shoppers quickly become uninterested shoppers when they are sweating through their jackets while waiting in long lines. The deal of the year suddenly starts looking a lot less interesting. But remote monitoring sensors placed around your store can gauge the real-time mercury reading long before your thermostat comes to the same conclusion and adjust it accordingly.

This type of environmental sensor isn't limited to thermostats, either. For those retailers who maintain items at a certain temperature — cigars and bottles of wine are great examples — wireless sensors can be placed inside a cooling environment to monitor temperatures as often as you like and log all that information in a cloud environment via WiFi or 3G. That can give store owners and managers incredible peace of mind when the retail store is closed or in the event of a storm, flood, hurricane, tornado, or earthquake that can knock the power offline. The sensors won't be affected by a lack of electricity because they are battery powered. More importantly, they can contact store employees by SMS or email if the temperature in a controlled environment rises above or belows its ideal reading.

Conclusion

The connectivity provided by the IoT can take brick-and-mortar stores beyond their physical dimensions and turn them into information gatherers and smart buildings capable of fine-tuning customer experience now and in the future.