An effective promotion determines the success of a product and at the same time would bring more sales for the store. So, it becomes very important to place them in the right place and at the right time since promotions only have a limited time for achieving success. Your store needs smarter ways to assess the performance of your promotions.

Video Management Software along with video analytics can help you in assessing your promotional strategies and make necessary changes to improve its performance. This analytics will not only help you position your promotions, but also help you in improvising marketing strategies, measure performance of each aisle and also product placements.

There are different analytical features that we will discuss in this blog, which can help a retail store to gain quick insights into the effectiveness of promotional activities with Video Analytics.

Event-Based Analysis

Promotions should attract customers and invoke their curiosity at the same time. However, inside a store, it will be very difficult to measure both these metrics.

If a customer spends more than the specified time in front of a promotion, looking at it, then it can be captured as an event. The camera placed above the promotional display can detect the event, and it will trigger an alert to the store manager who can then take necessary actions to help the customer.

This will help the store to understand if the promotional display, activity or offer is triggering the curiosity of their customers. On the other hand, it can also help you map the customer’s journey inside the store and will give you insights into where the customer spends more time inside your store.

Heat Mapping

In order to position your promotions, products or optimize marketing strategies you need to know the thriving spots in your shop. By way of heat mapping, you will be able to identify thriving spots, dead spots and bottlenecks in your store by capturing a series of images based on traffic. This will allow you to understand which aisles are performing well and thus position your ads and promotions in the right places.

The cameras capture images based on traffic patterns at different times and allow you visualize the traffic and optimize your promotional activities accordingly.

It also opens up doors to offer exceptional customer service by identifying busy aisles and stationing the staff to assist the customers. This will enhance the shopping experience, helping you retain customers and expand your customer base.

Smile Detection

Smile detection is a way of leveraging emotions to help you understand the response of the customers towards the promotions and marketing activities. It also helps you to understand that what kind of products and services your customers are interested in, and will help you save time on strategy building.

Smile detection is actually a two-step process. The camera (mounted above the display), in the first image, detects the face and then analyzes various facial features. A motion detector, on the other hand, divides the image into thousands of zones and then analyses parameters such as white balance and flash level for the face area. When a subject smiles, the camera recognizes the change in the face by identifying facial features, including narrowed eyes, visible teeth, upturned mouth corners and raised cheeks.

Eyeball Detection

Eyeball detection is another video analytical feature that can help you understand how many customers looked at a promotional display inside your store. Eyeball detection can be done using Haar cascades, which are massive XML files with many feature sets.

This will help you to understand whether the display promoting a particular product or service is powerful enough to attract the attention of the customer. This may work in tandem with the smile detection algorithm allowing you to optimize your marketing and promotional strategies accordingly.

Smart Shelves

Though the primary use of smart shelves is to display prices, the store can also push promotions on the smart shelves. This will attract the customer’s attention while he is trying to check out the prices.

Smart shelves may also encourage cross-selling, if we take the example of a customer shopping for baby products, on the same shelf the store manager could push a promotion for toys. This will increase the chances of a customer paying attention to the promotion, as it is relevant to them. By using people counting algorithms, the store manager can also assess that during the promotion how many people visited the aisle. This will help the store to understand the effectiveness and then make necessary optimization.

Retail stores have to evolve with the changing trends. In order to do so, they also need to measure their strategies quickly and optimize them quickly.

eInfochips provides retail video analytics solutions that will help you to improve your business processes, improve customer experience and understand the customer’s buying behavior along with improving security and surveillance.