Optimize Your Selling Channels

Being a successful retailer used to be a lot easier. Making sure customers had access to the right products at the right time was mainly an exercise in making sure stores were conveniently located and they were stocked with products appropriate for their markets. Widespread consumer adoption of digital shopping has dramatically changed the playing field. Consumers have access to a host of new retailers who don’t have a physical store close by; buying journeys often flow across physical and digital channels; and data-rich retailers are able to present more targeted product offers to specific customers even when the product is not stocked in a store near the customer. These factors give reason to optimize your selling channels.

The notion of being at the right place at the right time with the right product has become much more complex and the importance of coordinating customer experiences across channels is a new discipline customers are demanding and is critical for retail success. Based on a recent report by business advisor Deloitte, multichannel shoppers spend 85 percent more than those who only shop in the store. By enabling effective multi-channel shopping experiences, retailers can better serve those customers, beat out the competition, and increase revenue.

Location Intelligence is critical in developing and executing effective multichannel selling strategies. The basic premise of location intelligence is geographic data contains insights on consumer populations, competition, and likely consumer behaviors. Retailers apply location intelligence to understand the impact of online commerce on in-store commerce and vice versa, and to make smarter channel investments aligned with opportunity.

Understanding location intelligence to efficiently optimize selling channels

The concept of location intelligence is not new. In fact, it has been around in one form or another since the dawn of time, with cities popping up along ancient trade routes to supply goods and services to merchant caravans. But the power of what we now consider to be location intelligence, the application of geospatial data to solve a particular problem, was made crystal clear in 1850s London, when the physician John Snow overlaid a map of the city’s water pumps with occurrences of cholera and was able to narrow the source of the outbreak to a single pump.