The process of counting store traffic has rapidly evolved over the past few years. From equipping security guards at store entrances with handheld people counting devices to installing automated people counters, retailers have come a long way.

While most automated people counters provide an accurate count of the footfalls received by a store, they do not provide additional insights like the visitors’ demographic profile.

Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Retail Traffic Counters (ARTCs)!

What Are ARTCs?

ARTCs are AI-integrated cameras that accurately count the store traffic. Usually installed at the store entrance, ARTCs map the headcount of people walking in a store and automatically calculate the exact footfall count.

Advanced ARTC cameras like the ones offered by Thinkpoint integrate an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine at the backend and go one step further – they not only provide the accurate count of people visiting a store at any given point of time but also provide the visitors’ demographic details like their gender and age group.

Benefits

ARTCs offer a host of tangible benefits to retailers when it comes to optimizing their store performance. Below are 3 such notable benefits:

1. Sales Optimization

With ARTCs, retailers can accurately measure their stores’ conversion rate and the number of lost opportunities. Since ARTCs accurately record the number of people who visited a store, retailers can compare this data with their checkout data (number of invoices generated) and exactly figure out how many visitors actually purchased something and how many did not at any given point of time.

Retailers can then try to analyze why some visitors abandoned their in-store shopping and accordingly adopt preventive steps to reduce abandonment rates.

 2. Staff Optimization

ARTCs enable retailers to accurately pinpoint their stores’ peak times (i.e. time slots and days which attract maximum footfalls) and allocate staff accordingly.

Since a store’s conversion rate is directly proportional to its footfalls, allocating a higher number of experienced personnel during peak times can significantly increase conversions. Similarly, during periods of low traffic, retailers can smartly rotate their staff and assign crucial backend activities to experienced staff members while assigning the less-experienced personnel to man the store.

3. Marketing Optimization

Before the adoption of ARTCs, ‘incremental sale’ was the only parameter available to retailers for measuring the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

With ARTCs, retailers can now get deeper insights not only on their stores’ total incremental traffic but also on the incremental traffic within the specific target group (TG) that was reached out to through a marketing campaign.

For example, if a footwear brand launches a marketing campaign for women’s running shoes (with young working women as its primary TG), it’s brand manager(s) can now use the ARTC’s age-group data to exactly find out how many young women actually visited their stores during the campaign period. Insights such as these can significantly help retailers fine-tune their marketing campaigns to optimize their marketing spends.

To Sum It Up

With the advent of technologies like Facial Recognition, Heat Maps, and AI-based Retail Traffic Counters, retailers no longer have to solely depend on their store staff for actionable intelligence. Technologies such as these have time and again proved to be far more reliable when it comes to providing accurate information on customer behaviour that in turn helps retailers take proactive action to improve their stores’ performance.

To learn how Thinkpoint’s AI-based Retail Insights can help your brand optimize store performance, please get in touch with us on sales@thinkpointbrands.in.