How Location Intelligence Helps Retail Companies

Location intelligence (LI) helps organizations better understand the physical world using digital data. Businesses across all industries are leveraging location intelligence data to offer enhanced customer service, boost revenue, and improve operational efficiency. Similar to other sectors, retailers can harness the power of LI software and make better decisions.

A Gartner report predicts that 30% of customer interactions will be influenced by real-time location analysis by 2022. Retailers can take on new business opportunities by considering unidentified patterns in their data and understand important relationships between different data sources and types.

How does the Retail Industry Benefit from Location Intelligence?

Here are five ways how location intelligence transforms the retail industry.

1) Better Customer Experience

Location intelligence is the core component that helps retailers garner new and maintain the current consumer base. It plays a vital role in terms of in-store measurement of engagement and allows to set up an end-to-end omnichannel experience.

Retailers can assess customer purchase history and plan new marketing campaigns to increase store traffic and sales. They can segment customers’ purchase history, demography, and location to develop highly effective and personalized relationships. LI data also helps retailers target potential customers with specialized marketing messages via location-specific mediums. It is possible to analyze location-based marketing metrics to develop sustainable customer loyalty programs.

With LI data, brands and retailers can expand their potential to better understand behaviors by merging digital and real-world data.

2) Deeper Competitive Analysis

Retailers need to analyze their competitors’ market share while making critical business decisions like opening a new store. Location intelligence can help retailers learn about the position of a particular competitor in a specific geographical location.

Understanding customer loyalty of competitors in an area is also easier with location intelligence tools. Retailers can get insights about the frequency of store footfalls of competitor’s customers. A data-driven approach with LI data will help in analyzing competitors’ strengths. It is also possible to identify and attract less loyal customers by offering products and services they are interested in. Businesses can find locations with a unique competitive advantage that can help in growth.

3) Market Research and Product Development

One of the primary use cases of location data is to conduct market research before opening a new store or launching a product. Retailers can leverage location intelligence for business expansion plans and introduce new products with insights about where potential customers live and work, their habits, and the desires of existing customers.

They can learn about the relative performance of their existing outlets and delve into data like rush hours, peak customer traffic, and their behavioral patterns within each store. Retail store owners can also identify and categorize underperforming stores to assess their viability and potential and develop strategies to rectify the situation. They can help in boosting the market share and improve individual store performance.

4) Seamless Asset Tracking

Retailers need to manage the crucial task of tracking their delivery agents and manage the supply chain. Location intelligence platforms can help retail companies with seamless monitoring of assets. With the help of custom location apps, business owners can track a delivery executive’s exact location in real-time and calculate accurate ETAs. Retailers can track the locations of all delivery executives on a centralized system. They can use this system to analyze factors that may be responsible for delays and optimize routes for faster deliveries. Also, retailers can design custom tracking apps for their customers to track product deliveries.

5) Predictive Shopping and Consistent Buying Experience

Mining sales data from their locations will also help retailers spot historical sales patterns and predict future best sellers at each location. This will make it easier for them to improve the supply chain management of their different stores. Moreover, with LI data, retailers can offer a seamless buying experience both online and offline. A customer’s location can also be used to provide services like timely pickup or accurate delivery ETAs.

Final Thoughts

Simply collecting location data is not enough. To garner real value from the data, businesses need to connect their first-party data to other data sets and offer a higher level of business intelligence to explain their audiences and add a new perspective on the end-to-end customer journey.