Understanding your customer’s wants, needs, and impulses is crucial for delivering quality products and experiences to them. Few textile businesses or clothing brands operate exclusively online, which leaves the majority of brands in this industry dealing with a large number of physical customers.

Monitoring your customer’s behavior patterns has many benefits. Not only does it help you to cultivate a more comprehensive understanding of your audience’s wants, desires, and needs, but it also enables you to meet their needs in a more precise and targeted way.

But analyzing customer behavior can be a complex process, and there are several ways to go about it. In this guide, we’ll cover it all.

What is In-Store Tracking?
In-store tracking refers to the tracking of customer behavior while in-store to gain a deeper understanding of their needs, tendencies, and general patterns of behavior.

For instance, how many people visit your store per month? What kind of products are selling fastest? Does product placement play a role in value perception? What parts of the store get the most attention versus the least? What demographic comes through most often?

These are all important questions to ask when it comes to developing a strong marketing strategy for your brand, whether you are in the textile industry or not.

So how does in-store tracking work? This type of tracking is typically implemented through the use of technologies such as facial recognition systems and smart tracking tools. That information then gets processed through a central server that expresses it into hard data.

Why Should You Track Customer Behavior?
There are plenty of great reasons to track customer behavior. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to give them products and experiences that they really respond to, resulting in better customer relationships and bigger profits.

Some of the main practical benefits of tracking in-store customer behavior include:

1. Allows you to employ targeted marketing techniques
Targeted marketing techniques are only possible when you know exactly what and how to target. The information you receive from in-store marketing can tell you everything you need to know about which products perform the best and how to angle your marketing strategies to produce the highest possible level of audience reception and traffic.

2. Improves customer support
Customer support is an extremely important part of running a business. Without a strong customer support system, it will be very difficult to retain loyal customers or attract new ones.

But with the insights provided by in-store tracking systems, you can learn more about what customers want from you in terms of products, communication, and social needs. With a great customer support system, your customers can cultivate deeper and more sustainable relationships with your brand as a whole.

3. Optimizes layout product offerings
Sometimes, all you need is a new perspective. Something as simple as an in-store camera can help you observe the flow of customers in your store, noticing where they stop, where they walk past, and where there tends to be the most (or least activity).

Creating an easy, free-flowing planogram for your store layout is essential for promoting sales and creating a positive customer experience for your audience, and in-store tracking can be the tool that helps you implement one.

4. Helps you create more innovative products
Another way that in-store tracking can help your company is by highlighting new opportunities for products that sell well.

For instance, perhaps you discover through your customer behavior data that women between the ages of 25-35 prefer buying women’s plain t-shirts rather than those with a print—but they are very rarely in stock. Learning this information can help you to ensure that you have larger volumes of this product in stock to cater towards this particular demographic.

Different Ways to Track Customer Behavior Through In-Store Tracking
If the idea of in-store tracking still sounds a little daunting to you, that’s okay. It is a broad-reaching concept with many different ways of being implemented. Some of the most popular ways to track customer behavior in-store include the following methods:

1. Face analysis software
Facial recognition software is capable of recognizing and capturing the faces of people who enter your store. And yes, it is perfectly legal and simpler than you might think.

This kind of software has already been implemented in stores for many years and is more integrated into popular commerce systems than you might think. For example:

• Scan items and present face
• Self-checkout with facial recognition-based payments
• Tailored assistance

This kind of software is also beneficial in more than one way. In addition to capturing useful marketing data, it can also help prevent theft and shoplifting by identifying previous offenders and recognizing potentially dangerous individuals.

2. In-store cameras
In-store cameras are a classic method for monitoring the movements and behavior of physical customers. But while many businesses use them as a mere tool for capturing potential shoplifters, they have many more uses beyond that.

Cameras can tell you everything you need to know about the efficiency of your store layout and any dead zones in need of upliftment. Watching sped-up footage of your in-store traffic can provide powerful insights into the flow of your physical store. You can also create heat maps or use heat mapping software to determine which are the “hot” areas and where the cold spots that need attention are.

3. Analytics software
Even though we’re discussing in-store customer behavior, you can still convert physical patterns of behavior into digital data for easier tracking over time. There are plenty of software systems designed to do exactly this, such as:

• Business Intelligence Platform
• Queue Management System
• Demographic Analysis
• Zone Analytics
• Customer Counting System

These systems and processes can be found across a wide variety of different brands, all of which are designed to help you create the most customer-friendly store dynamic possible.

4. Wrapping Up
Developing a keen understanding of your customer’s natural instincts and behavior within your store can provide key insights into how you can improve everything from the layout to the visual merchandising. Customer behavior is constantly evolving, so tracking it will keep you up to speed with all the latest consumer trends.

With the help of these resources, any business can start implementing in-store tracking for improved customer analysis and better relationships.

Founder & Editor of Textile Learner. He is a Textile Consultant, Blogger & Entrepreneur. He is working as a textile consultant in several local and international companies. He is also a contributor of Wikipedia.

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