With the proliferation of technology in every walk of life, an increasing number of retailers are adopting new-age technologies to improve their store sales.

In our previous post, we highlighted how Facial Recognition is helping retailers adapt to changing buyer behaviour by accurately analyzing shopper insights. In this post, we’ll see how retailers are leveraging Heat Maps to analyze their in-store traffic and take better decisions.

Decoding Heat Maps

To simplify, a Heat Map is a colour-coded visual representation of data in the form of a map or a diagram.

At the frontend of a Heat Map solution is a Fisheye Camera that captures the flow of shoppers within a store. This data is then shared with the backend Heat Map AI Engine that analyzes the shoppers’ flow and presents it visually in distinct colours – bright colours for high footfall areas and light colours for low footfall areas.

How Heat Maps Help Retailers

Heat Maps offer retailers meaningful insights on the flow of their in-store traffic. This data can be then used to make better decisions regarding the store layout, product placements, marketing promotions, PoS communication, in-store VM, brand ads, etc.

Below are 4 important ways in which Heat Maps help retailers effectively plan their in-store strategy:

1. Identify High and Low Footfall Areas

Using dedicated Heat Map Cameras, the backend Heat Maps AI Engine visually marks various locations in a store. By marking high footfall areas in bright colours and low footfall areas in light colours, Heat Maps accurately identify areas where customers frequent the most and the least. This insight helps retailers change their product/PoS placements to promote specific product categories over others.

2. Identify Location-specific Traffic

With Heat Maps, retailers can accurately identify specific locations within their store that are most frequently visited by their shoppers. This feature is especially important for shop-in-shop formats wherein brand managers can identify the number of shoppers that in-store shops/kiosks vis-à-vis the store’s total traffic. Using this insight, brand managers can then decide on the promotions and marketing communications they need to implement to attract higher footfalls for their shop-in-shop.

3. Calculate ‘Dwell Time’

Heat Maps provide retailers a very important performance metric known as ‘Dwell Time’ i.e. the exact amount of time a shopper spends in specific locations inside the store. Combining dwell time with traffic flow insights, retailers can accurately identify the in-store areas that need more attention rather than depending on the verbal feedback provided by their store staff. Using these insights, retailers can then adopt remedial measures for low-footfall areas by introducing new product promotions or changing the section layout to match the merchandise that captivates shoppers.

4. Queue Management

Using Heat Maps, retailers can efficiently manage the queues inside their stores. This insight helps retailers identify the exact amount of time that shoppers spend at the billing counters for completing their billing transaction(s). By analyzing the store footfall count and queue times, retailers can then adjust their billing-counter staff and/or billing processes to minimize queue times and facilitate faster checkouts thereby improving their customers’ shopping experience.

With every passing day, Heat Maps are becoming an essential tool for retailers to understand the true potential of their store. With accurate data, retailers no longer have to solely depend on their store staff’s inputs for optimizing the store layouts and in-store promotional strategies to optimize conversions and sales.

To learn how Thinkpoint can help your store adopt Heat Map analytics to improve sales, please get in touch with us on sales@thinkpointbrands.in.