Manual Clickers
A staff stood at the entrance and clicked on a counting device each time a customer entered the premises.
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People counters are essentially any type of device that counts the number of people walking in and out of a certain specified area.
While people counters started out as a simple, manual clicker in the hands of a doorman, they have quickly evolved to become complex machines capable of generating large amounts of in-store data around customer behaviour, visitor demographics, store layout, staff performance and marketing effectiveness.
What’s the reason for the sudden surge in popularity of people counters?
Well, the credit partly goes to pure play online retailers for showcasing the incredible power of customer behaviour insights in boosting sales and revenue. Whenever there is a drop in the conversion rates of an Ecommerce website, it's fairly easy to find the root cause; thanks to in-depth website analytics and customer data available to online retailers. But brick and mortar stores have it tougher when it comes to pinpointing the reason for drop/spike in sales.
Most of the major offline retailers are now investing in advanced people counters to level the online-offline playing field and access the same level of in-depth data as ecommerce brands to understand and optimize store conversion and sales.
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While people counters have been in existence for more than 20 years, they were not successful in providing useful insights due to data inaccuracies and technological limitations. But all of that changed in recent years and the latest people counters boast of more than 95% accuracy and the ability to offer critical insights like product preferences of customers, visitor gender and age and comprehensive footfall analytics .
A staff stood at the entrance and clicked on a counting device each time a customer entered the premises.
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For many years, Ecommerce brands enjoyed a major advantage over brick and mortar stores - massive amounts of customer data. In many ways, people counters has helped offline retailers to level the playing field by offering in-depth customer data like customer demographics, product preferences, purchase history etc.
People counters empower offline retailers to increase their sales and conversion through a combination of several factors like improving store layout using heatmap data, understand customer preferences based on dwell times, personalize product offerings based on customer age and gender and effective staff allocation around store peak hours.
Rising labour costs is a major concern for offline retailers in both developed and emerging markets. People counters help retailers to understand optimize labour costs by offering store conversion ratios and peak hour analytics. Store conversion ratio is a critical metric for retailers as it offers insights into the effectiveness of their sales staff.
Today's Connected Customers are used to highly personalized brand interactions in the digital world. On the other hand, offline stores have struggled to personalize customer interactions due to lack of customer data and behaviour insights. People counters can help brick and store retailers to bridge this 'personalization gap' through in-depth customer data like gender, age, product preferences and past purchase behaviour.
Previously, retailers were left in the lurch with regards to the effectiveness and engagement levels of their marketing campaigns. AI-powered people counters measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by monitoring spike in footfalls, dwell times near specific products and overall conversion ratio for a promoted product.
Looking for People Counter Solution?
While they vary in shape and size, they typically use one of the following technologies :
Thermal imaging systems use heat-sensitive sensors to count visitors using embedded technology. They are highly unreliable due to susceptibility to weather conditions and humidity.
People counters are expected to play a vital role in the future of retail; most likely as a critical cog that enables seamless sync between emerging retail trends like Augmented Reality, Internet of Things and Omnichannel commerce.
Learn how the world's leading retailers are using VisitorMetrixTM to enhance customer experience and boost sales.
