The Missed Opportunity As retailers swarm to mobile platforms to get visibility into the browsing behaviour of their shoppers, there’s one piece of data that many seem to be missing. And it’s perhaps the most important – the transaction.

Data from shoppers browsing your mobile app or mobile website can give insight into most viewed products. By including in-store redeemable offers, you can even get insight into which of your promoted products people buy the most of. A mobile loyalty card will even give you visibility into how often an individual shopper buys something. Unfortunately, it’s here that many retailers stop.

By taking the digital evolution of the in-store environment a little further, retailers can create a fully connected “internet of things” (IoT) which gives them full visibility into the popularity of different products and the performance of different campaigns because without that final piece of the puzzle, you’re not quite looking at the full picture.

Connecting with consumer on a Mobile App and IoT devices provides new opportunities to link specific market efforts to changes in consumer’s behaviour and what specific purchasing took place because of this in the bricks and mortar stores.

Once a retailer gets transaction data and mobile behaviour data in one place they know what products a customer looked at, when they came into the store and what promotions they showed interest in. And most importantly, they now also know what the customer purchased - not just from offers scanned within the app, but also any other products purchased at the same time.

This in itself isn’t completely revolutionary – some analysis of POS data will give you an idea of what products were purchased with a particular promotional item. However, it’s the ability to also layer that data over individual customer data like demographics and behavioural data that gives us a full picture of what led to the sale. And of course because all the data is collected in real-time and in one place, it can be fed into machine learning systems and other platforms to continuously evolve the customer experience.

So why aren’t More Retailers doing it? There are two main blockers to retailers implementing a fully closed loop approach to marketing at the moment: First of all, there’s the overhead of integration – POS systems aren’t always easy to integrate with, especially the older systems and many larger chains have multiple versions of POS terminals across their chains. Secondly, there’s an inability to actually use the data – there’s no point in collecting it if you can’t actually make use of it.

To overcome some of the difficulty in integration, it’s important to look at where you store your data – a temptation for many retailers is to use their POS or CRM system as the preferred point of storage. However, as these are often the bulkiest systems to change, that can create problems. Instead, look to the newest system – often the backend of your mobile app. By pulling data out of legacy systems and into your mobile app you not only ease the headaches of integration significantly, but you also remove the risk of giving marketing access to potentially sensitive areas of those systems, giving the IS team the control to expose on the necessary data into the marketing ecosystem.

It’s also important to evaluate any new systems you’re pumping data into to ensure that they are developed to modern open standards. Make sure they can easily have data exposed or push data out to external systems and dashboards. As technologies like machine learning evolve, you need the freedom to be able to plug new systems in to use or add to your data set.

It’s definitely not without its challenges, but if retailers get it right the pay-off is well worth the time and effort. In-store sales will finally have all the measurability and advantages of an online store (with the added benefit of a smiling face at the counter).