How are you using data to improve sales?

[JL503]

I was just wondering who is using data to help improve sales, and if so what company are you going through? I see the trend now is to use data to help facilitate better relationships with customers and to understand their buying habits, but Im wondering where to begin. I want an easy system to help identify customers buying habits and improve my operations to increase sales.

[Harold Mansfield]

What kind of sales are you doing? Brick and Mortar store? Or online?

[JL503]

I am doing apparel sales in a brick and mortar.

[Harold Mansfield]

I want an easy system to help identify customers buying habits and improve my operations to increase sales.
There is no easy system. People spend years learning and keeping up with changes consumer behavior and buying habits. There are no concrete measurements specific to your business in your area. You have to use your own knowledge and tweak your own marketing based on what works and what doesn't.

You could of course go to the Library or County records and get general info on demographics, and retail sales in your area, but you'll still need to develop your own plan based on that information.

If there were a system that told business owners exactly what to do to increase sales, in every situation, for every product, targeting every demographic..everyone would be doing it.

[JL503]

Thanks for the advice. Seems like there may be an additional opportunity from a need I have. I may look into ways of gathering and easily presenting data, to better understand customers and their buying habits. If I could get even a small amount of data, it would help me to create more focused and engaging advertising.

[Harold Mansfield]

Thanks for the advice. Seems like there may be an additional opportunity from a need I have. I may look into ways of gathering and easily presenting data, to better understand customers and their buying habits. If I could get even a small amount of data, it would help me to create more focused and engaging advertising.
You could of course go to the Library or County records and get general info on demographics, and retail sales in your area


Knowing who you are talking to, will go a long way to formulating a plan of how to talk to them. Local demographics will give you home values, income ranges, professions and so on. Combine that with recent census information and you can get a pretty clear picture of who is in your target market and where they are.
And you can get all of that info for free, or you can pay a research firm for it.

[billbenson]

It's far easier to get the information you are looking for online than in a brick and mortar environment. Let's say you have a jacket in your store. You would like to know if people like it, what a good price point is, do skinnier or heavier women like it etc. On line, you can see if someone looked at the jacket, how long they looked at it for, whether they came back and showed it to their husband or someone else. And you know if they bought it.

In a brick and mortar store, I suspect you have to rely more on responses to TV ads etc. More time and a lot more money. And in the end you will ultimately get less information.

I'm assuming you want to improve sales in your one store, not expand at this point. I would make a locally targeted website. Put the same products on it that you have in your store. Use the site to advertise the store but also gather the information you are looking for.

Also, there is pay per click (PPC) advertising such as AdWords from Google. AdWords usually takes some knowledge and time to use it effectively. But you can certainly use it to test products, prices, etc in your geographical area. AdWords doesn't have to be just for product sales. It can be used for many things like the data mining you are looking for.