Data is considered the lifeblood of a retail business. It allows you to unlock a treasure of insights into customer behavior, sales patterns, and market trends. In today’s competitive landscape, data analytics has become a crucial tool for retailers to stay ahead of the curve and gain a competitive edge. By harnessing the power of data, retailers can make informed decisions, optimize their operations, and create personalized customer experiences that drive sales and loyalty.

As multi-channel shopping is becoming the norm, data is becoming increasingly important. Let’s learn how retailers can leverage the benefits of retail analytics in the present time-sensitive retail environment.

Why does data in retail matter?

One of the keys to achieving retail success is to be more data-centric. Relying on analytics and hard data rather than guesswork enables you to make smarter decisions toward inventory management, pricing, marketing, sales, and other aspects of your business. By analyzing data, retailers can identify which products drive more revenue, what time of day or year customers are most likely to shop, which marketing campaigns are most effective, and much more. This can help retailers optimize their operations, improve customer satisfaction, and increase profitability.

The global retail analytics market is predicted to grow from $5.84 billion in 2021 to $18.33 billion in 2028. Retailers must empower their employees with big data and behavior analytics to help them achieve operational excellence, strategize customer journeys, and understand them better while optimizing budgets and resources with accurate demand forecasting

Key benefits of retail analytics for your business

Although big data analytics has gained popularity, the retail industry has adopted data-oriented strategies more slowly than other sectors. As per a study by Harvard Business Review, 5% of the retail businesses surveyed were classified as data-driven organizations in the report.

Now is the opportune moment for forward-thinking retail businesses to harness the power of data analytics and gain a competitive edge. Without further ado, let’s explore how data can benefit retailers:

1. Understand your customer and deliver a personalized shopping experience

Retail analytics can provide a 360-degree customer view by combining data from various sources, such as sales transactions, customer interactions, and social media, to create a comprehensive profile of each customer. This profile includes data on customer demographics, purchase history, preferences, behaviors, and engagement with the brand.

By analyzing this data, retailers can have a deeper understanding of each customer’s interests, buying power, lifetime value, churn risk, and historical record of purchases made across retail touchpoints. This allows them to deliver personalized brand experiences that resonate with each shopper on their preferred channel at the right time. In addition, retailers can use this information to tailor marketing campaigns and promotions to each customer segment and encourage recommendation-based purchases that match their unique needs and preferences.

2. Strategize customer journey

With the proliferation of digital channels, customer journeys are becoming complex. The customer buying journey now has several stages, starting with research across channels, analysis, demo, purchase, service, checkout, and after-sale service. Creating a top-notch buying journey is possible with the help of big data analytics. You can:

• Identify the preferred customer channels
• Determine the most engaging customer touchpoints
• Assess which promotional content is performing the most
• Determine critical stages for customer satisfaction during and after purchase

With this information, retailers can create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns, optimize customer service and elevate the customer experience. There are great stand-alone marketing solutions to help businesses create a personalized customer journey. CDMS by Confiz is one dynamic solution that leverages the power of data to help retail businesses understand customer behavior and automatically launch personalized campaigns for customers through their preferred channel at scale! The solution combines powerful capabilities of customer data activation, marketing automation, content personalization, and multichannel messaging in a single platform. Your sales and marketing teams can track customer behavior across multiple touchpoints and execute cross-channel engagement campaigns accordingly.

Optimize operations and inventory management  (Additional pro tip)

With the right tools for collecting and harnessing information, businesses can sustain growth by making optimal utilization of their resources. By simply leveraging POS data, for example, organizations can pave the way toward business excellence.

Most modern Point-of-sale solutions these days come with reporting features that can give insights into important metrics such as customer counts, profit margins, basket sizes, sales trends, and more.  

For example, looking at your periodic sales reports will tell you exactly which products or suppliers are driving revenue so you can plan your staff rosters, procurement, and replenishments accordingly.  

This information can be used to make informed decisions about product stocking, staffing, and reducing the risk of overstocking and waste.  

In addition, through analyzing POS records, you know more about your customers and their spending and eating habits, and you can go one step further to build a relationship with them. Retailers can also use data analytics to optimize their supply chain operations. By tracking supplier performance, retailers can identify areas for improvement and make changes to their procurement process. This can help reduce costs, improve delivery times, and increase efficiency.  

• Data in inventory optimization can help with questions such as:  
• What amount of inventory is required to meet the current demand without overstocking?  
• How to optimize stock management?  
• How to reduce product recalls?  
• How to enable cross-selling to improve the performance of slow-moving stocks?

Unleash the power of customer data with Dynamics 365 CRM

In the competitive world of retail, adopting a customer-first approach is essential to stay ahead of the game. One way to achieve this is by implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, which empowers businesses to gain insights from customer data.

With Dynamics 365 CRM, retailers can centralize, and streamline all customer journey data, making it easier to understand their customers. The platform comes equipped with a complete set of powerful tools, such as Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence, and data visualization tools. These tools enable retailers to generate valuable insights, build stronger customer relationships and close deals faster while creating targeted marketing campaigns and personalized experiences that are more likely to boost conversions and drive more revenue.

Dynamics 365 CRM also offers retailers insights into their sales performance, including revenue, product mix, and average transaction value. By leveraging this data, retailers can optimize their pricing and promotions strategy, forecast future sales, and avoid overstocking. Furthermore, the insights generated with Dynamics 365 CRM can improve customer engagement and drive repeat business, making it an essential platform for retailers looking to build lasting customer relationships.

Final words

A retailer’s biggest assets are data and its people. By leveraging the power of customer data, retailers can stay ahead of the competition, create better customer experiences, and ultimately build a more successful business.

If you’re looking to transform how your retail business approaches customer experiences and increase growth, leveraging data is the key. One way to achieve this is by implementing Dynamics 365 CRM. As a Microsoft Gold Partner with over 15 years of experience serving the retail industry, Confiz has a team of 185+ D365 consultants, engineers, and subject matter experts who can assist you with D365 consultation, implementation, and support.

To learn more about how we can help you improve your business and leverage the benefits of retail analytics, schedule a consultancy call with us by contacting us at marketing@confiz.com. Let us help you unlock the full potential of your customer data!