How In-Store Video Analytics Can Drive Targeted Customer Marketing
Technology makes lives easier. And that’s true for businesses too. A simple example is that of CCTV cameras and surveillance systems. How? Let’s understand.
While you might think of these as mere ‘in-store watchdogs’, they serve purposes beyond. For example, do you know that video surveillance systems in retail stores go the extra mile to enhance your customers’ experience, thereby adding more business value?
These powerful tools, combined with analytics could help you focus more specifically on your customer needs and take your business to newer strides.
Research suggests that the Indian Video Surveillance analytics software market is projected to grow significantly.
In this blog, we delve into how CCTV security systems play a role in video analytics and help the latter contribute to targeted customer marketing.
CCTV Cameras - A gesture towards better customer service
Regardless of the industry vertical, it’s imperative to understand customer preferences and interests to cater to them effectively. That said, businesses are constantly striving for ways to drive sales and increase revenue in addition to retaining customers.
While most retailers use technologies like Bluetooth-based beacons and footfall traffic counters, research indicates they aren’t able to understand the customer’s needs. And, when it comes to collecting customer data, they are confronted with a dilemma as to rely on manual collection or look for customer data that exists in siloes in various departments.
Well, video analytics solutions come to the rescue. They tackle this problem by bringing in numerous points of customer trend data, which the business managers can interpret and arrive at actionable insights regarding customer preferences. That said, video analytics processes on- demand or real-time surveillance using AI-based tools to extract and identify the objects in the video. This helps transform video surveillance and CCTV camera footage into useful, searchable, and actionable insights that can be used across divisions of retail business including merchandising, marketing, and sales.
This helps transform video surveillance and CCTV camera footage into useful, searchable, and actionable insights that can be used across divisions of retail business including merchandising, marketing, and sales.
Using In-store Video Analytics to drive customer marketing
Having understood the role and importance of CCTV cameras in video analytics, let’s explorehow they can be pivotal to driving targeted customer marketing.
Bridging the corporate siloes: Video analytics tools interpret the data from the surveillance systems and offer useful insights in the form of graphs, charts, heatmaps, and more. In addition, this software provides options to drill-down reports and construct customizable dashboards on aspects like customer demographics, choices, and such which help in critical decision-making.
These reports are shared across the company’s departments to break the organizational silos. Therefore, all divisions would get a complete picture of the customer insights, which helps in strategic planning for marketing.
Understanding customer demographics: Surveillance systems in retail shops provide inputs on the visitors. Video analytics systems collate the data from the CCTV cameras. They offer information on customer demographics, such as whether more in-store visitors are males or females, adults or children, etc.
This could help the in-store marketing teams plan targeted campaigns that would encourage the customers to visit again and attract new customers.
Analyzing in-store footfall traffic: Video analytics tools collect the data from the CCTV security systems to track customer footfall traffic, shopper patterns, and other parameters such as average times spent in-store including bounce or return to certain retail outlets, and more.
Other important factors like the placing of advertisements in the retail stores based on traffic volume, optimizing the site layout, making notes of any specific days of the week or holidays when customers visit more often, etc., can help marketing and advertising personnel to launch fresh campaigns.
Building brand loyalty through customer experience: In-store analytics plays a major role in enhancing brand loyalty and increasing customer retention as the tools capture personalized customer experiences. From queue management to people-count alerting and from heatmaps to custom dashboards to understand customer behaviour patterns, these software tools provide marketing managers with ways to make meaningful decisions and formulate data-driven strategies.
Closing thoughts
There’s no doubt that video surveillance systems are a mandate for ensuring in-store safety and security. However, video analytics could transform customer experiences and go a long way in business value creation when used in conjunction with surveillance systems.
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