Study Says Feeding Managers Data Can Boost Sales

Data is endemic to the retail process at this point, but the question of how deep down the organizational tree that data goes is still an unanswered one. Some merchants wield store-by-store data like trade secrets, but a new study indicates that a more open hand at the manager level can be a welcome boost to brick-and-mortar sales.

A recent report from HeadCount, “In-store Traffic and Conversion Study: Retailers Find Keys to Impressive ROI,” found that managers provided with data, and effective analytics to affect stores and target customers were able to increase each transaction about $0.67 on average, via Chain Store Age. The field experiment took place in 600 stores, and of the verticals studied, housewares shoppers seemed the most receptive to data-influenced operations, with $1.01 more spent.

Unfortunately for department stores still looking for a way out of trouble, apparel consumers proved the opposite, with a boost of just $0.26.

While there might not be anything revolutionary about a study confirming data’s effectiveness in the retail workplace, the report did uncover a novel insight about how that data goes best from the digital to physical world. Instead of common in-store management systems that present dashboards and accessible troves of data, HeadCount gave some managers a “daily traffic and conversion scorecard” every morning at 9 a.m. This proved highly popular with the managers themselves, instead of formats that had them pull data from a larger source when needed.

As long as the scorecard itself is up to snuff, that could be a worthwhile takeaway.