Introduction

Retailers across all industries are moving into a data-driven era  utilising factual data and other valuable derived insights to enable more efficient business decisions. Accurat’s dashboard provides companies insights over a period of time and showcase how key metrics such as market penetration, dwell time or even visit transfers are evolving for your brand as well as your competitors. Location data makes it far easier to interpret offline behaviour that helps improve your relationship with customers. But how can these insights help understand customer loyalty?

The evidence of customer satisfaction is loyalty. It is proof that your customers know you care about them. In order to achieve this, retailers across various industries acknowledge the importance of understanding their customers. Most retail chains use loyalty cards for this purpose. Some  track every click on their website made by a single visitor. Yet, on average 80% of retail sales are generated in physical stores. This creates the question: how well do retailers really understand their shopper’s offline behaviour?

1. Insights are power

In the challenge to obtain loyalty, there are more aspects than the consumer and their lifestyle. Location data allows competitors' locations to be monitored and obtain a relative view of consumers' footfall patterns and loyalty rates. Armed with these insights, brands can see what percentage of their customers visit rival stores or restaurants. 

The following use case details the observation that 46 % of a larger A-retailer’s consumers combine their shopping experience with a visit to the local competitor’s discount store on a frequent basis. This group of customers are called brand combiners, consumers who combine a brand with another brand on a frequent basis. Further insights showcase that customers of the A-retailer commonly visit the discount store on a Wednesday, due to the fact that this is their weekly big promo day. Thanks to location intelligence, the A-retailer can understand which brand they are losing visitors to on a specific day, but it also serves as a valuable source of information regarding future store expansion.

2. Analyse to Understand Loyalty

Adopting location data solutions into a company’s daily operations is a key driver for understanding customer loyalty and leads the way to profit maximisation, sales success and sustainable growth. The post-pandemic world provides enough evidence that brand-based and local shopping have increased loyalty. Even now with the contemporary energy crisis, discount behaviour has been growing tremendously while the market keeps evolving with store expansions of you and your competitors to increase their share in the market. This raises the question whether retailers and other organisations rely on factual intelligence. This data must contain actionable information that supports the decisions taken while staying in touch with the needs and wants of customers.

This is where Accurat steps in. Gut feeling is becoming less and less justifiable, especially when it comes to your competition. Every retail organisation should analyse their competitors to gain actionable insights that provide benchmarking possibilities. Customer loyalty is inherently linked to your competitors, and this is exactly why you need to understand your competition and how your customers behave towards them. In order to understand how loyal your customer is to your brand, you need to understand the bigger picture. With Accurat’s dashboard, you can analyse the frequency and recency of your visitors, benchmarked with the competition. Additionally, market penetration insights reveal the number of customers that visit your stores during a selected month, compared to competitors. From this figure you can also derive customers loyal to your brand and products. These actionable insights allow you to optimise your loyalty campaigns towards customer behaviour and its loyalty to you. Without this data, you wouldn’t be able to realise how often your customers - that you thought were loyal to your brand - visit the competition. 

3. Not Everything is as it Seems

Is loyalty truly measurable? This is a question every retail brand has to ask themselves. Having a 100% loyalty rate is not applicable in each and every industry. People buy a new car every few years, however, we all do grocery shopping on a daily basis. The objective to aim for a 100% loyalty rate is almost an illusion, even if you know that 1 out of 12 is as faithful as a dog towards your brand. There is not a predefined parameter for loyalty either, it can be the gross margin of store visits that a customer attends, or the frequency that this person visits your store. Instead, you influence loyalty towards customers who are able to visit your store on a more regular basis. These are customers who live and work nearby or pass by your store frequently. It is a very complex topic as a consequence of the location. An ordinary person who lives in Ghent but works in Antwerp will not stay loyal to one sandwich store, simply because the location of his visit is determined by the place where he lives and performs his job. He is loyal to the sandwich store in Ghent because of the location where he lives. On the other hand, he is also loyal to the sandwich store in Antwerp, since this is the place where he performs his job.

4. This is where Location Intelligence steps in…

Accurat offers practical data and insights based on real-world behaviour. Based on the collection and daily extraction of smartphone data & raw GPS coordinates retailers and restaurants can uncover precious intelligence regarding their customer’s shopping patterns and loyalty towards your brand. Location intelligence will help you understand how they travel to your store, to which competitors you lose customers and how stable their loyalty to you is compared to the competitors they visit.

Another use case details the observation of Belgian self-service restaurant chain Lunch Garden. The chain has more than 70 branches across the country. However, Accurat’s location intelligence platform notes that the customer frequency of Lunch Garden is significantly lower than that of some of its competitors. On average, customers have a meal at Lunch Garden only once a month while the competition is enjoying an average frequency of more than 2 times per month. Armed with this knowledge, Lunch Garden can adapt their business strategy and introduce a discount coupon that customers can use on their second visit in the same month. The choice to act on this knowledge will enable not only a boost in profits, it will also lead to an increase in customer loyalty.

5. Imagine the possibilities

Adopting location intelligence solutions into a company’s daily operations will allow for predictive analysis and is a key driver for understanding customer loyalty and lead the way to profit maximisation. AI software can help a business by providing deep, trusted location-based insights that will help the firm understand customers. It does not only reveal where people go before and after visiting your location. Commuting and competitive shopping patterns are no secrets to the business anymore. This also leads to an optimization of door-to-door & OOH campaigns while it also diminishes local challenges related to your competitors and substitute brands. The future of the industry predicts that this type of data insights will only become more omni-present and accurate due to our ever increasing panel size.