Big data has positively impacted numerous industries including retail sector. It provides a competitive edge to businesses to stay ahead of time. As per a report of Statista, decentralized general-merchandise retailers who use big data to create performance group clusters, saw an approximate increase of 3-4% in their sales. Big data analytics help the companies understand customer’s shopping trends, get meaningful data insights, plan marketing strategies, etc. which can help them improve their bottom line figures.
Let us discuss in detail how big data impacts retail sector:
- Generating Recommendations: Big data analytics enable businesses to predict customer buying behavior based on their purchase history. This helps the retailers in understanding their product preferences and plan accordingly. Also, machine learning models enable retailers to generate accurate recommendations for the customers.
- Forecasting Market Trends: Customer’s demographic information and other economic indicators can be used to forecast market demands.
- Strategic Decision Making: Businesses can consolidate data & generate information for making strategic & informed decisions.
- Personalized Marketing: Big data enables retailers to perform one-to-one marketing and reach out to the target customer at the right place and at the right time.
- Identifying Valuable Customers: One major benefit of big data analytics is that it helps the retailers to identify and focus on valuable customers. Thus, businesses can offer them additional discounts for better engagement, enhancing customer loyalty, etc. by capitalizing on the data insights.
- Right Pricing: Earlier, retailers used to reduce the price of their products at the end of a buying season. However, big data analytics help the businesses in determining when the demand starts decreasing to gradually decrease the prices, thus maximizing revenues.
- Enhancing Customer Experience: Big data analytics helps in anticipating buyer’s preferences which leads to a seamless customer experience.
- Designing In-Store Marketing Tactics: Big data enables retailers to adjust & design in-store marketing strategies. It considers factors like foot traffic, in-store checkout & wait time, etc. to serve their customers better as well increase business’s revenue.
- Utilizing Market Basket Analysis: Big data tools like Hadoop are used to conduct market basket analysis. It helps retailers to analyze the purchase history to understand the combination of products that are usually bought together by their customers.
Every individual has a digital footprint and big data is used to gather insights about an individual’s choices to form reasonable patterns out of it. Big data can be used at every step of retail process i.e. from recognizing target customers, studying their preferences to identifying market demand. Thus, big data analytics play a very important role in retail marketing.
For more information on Big Data and its application, call Centex Technologies at (254) 213-4740.