Category Archives: Retail

RILA Loss Prevention Show Wrap-Up

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Posted in: Loss Prevention, Marketing & Sales, Retail

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The 2012 annual Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) Loss Prevention Audit & Safety Conference was held last week in Dallas bringing together asset protection and safety professionals from over 80 companies. Attendees were able to hear from thought leaders in the industry on the latest advancements in asset protection and find solutions to the challenges they face.  The conference covered a number of pertinent topics but a key theme rang true, retail loss prevention technology is quickly evolving and organizations are eager to invest in technologies that will not just help LP, but the entire retail organization at whole.

Many of the breakout sessions discussed how these emerging technologies can be leveraged including the case study presentation ‘Managing Video as a Service to Drive Loss Prevention Results and Deliver Demonstrated Profitability Improvement.’ Alecia Camps of Big Lots and our own CEO, Matt Steinfort discussed the benefits of Managed Video as a Service for the retail industry using a case study on Big Lots.  MVaaS solutions integrate video with business systems such as point of sale extending the impact of loss prevention to cover more locations and support more investigations and prosecutions. Envysion’s easy to use exception reports enables loss prevention specialists to quickly identify high risk transactions and instantly review the corresponding video, allowing LP teams to rapidly determine and document cases of theft or fraud.

Further, the meaningful visual footage can be shared across departments throughout the entire organization. The video can be integrated to merchandising tools adding a whole new dimension to understanding customer behavior and give retailers unfiltered real-time insight into operations.  Beyond loss prevention the video solution can be used to ensure consistent execution on the brand promise, identify best practices for training purpose and gain unfiltered insight into the execution of marketing programs.

We’re pleased to make the slides from the RILA presentation ‘Managing Video as a Service to Drive Loss Prevention Results and Deliver Profitability Improvement’ available. Specific examples of exception reports, transactions and videos demonstrate how Big Lots and other multi-unit retailers are using MVaaS to improve the results of loss prevention and other departments – ultimately driving store-level profitability improvements. View Slides

Online or In Store? Where Do You Get the Most Bang for Your Marketing Buck?

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Posted in: Marketing & Sales, Retail

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Imagine for a moment that the CEO of a multichannel retailer has just tasked the marketing team with increasing average basket size in their respective channels in the next two months. The channel who achieves the best results will receive the bulk of next year’s marketing budget. How do you proceed?

The online channel marketer looks at the website analytics and develops a hypothesis that changing how the shopping cart displays additional sale items will better capture the shopper’s attention and drive more up sells. The online marketer builds the new shopping cart, runs an A/B test on the new shopping cart display versus the old one for a month, compiles the data and determines that her hypothesis was correct. The new shopping cart did in fact increase basket size and should be implemented across the entire website.

The physical channel marketer responsible for the brick and mortar stores has a similar theory that the up sell items displayed at the checkout are not capturing shoppers’ attention. He too designs a new display, but that’s where things begin to break down. How does the physical channel marketer ensure the new displays are set up properly or on time or at all? How does he measure if the display is working?

At the end of the two months, both marketers report back to the CEO. The online channel marketer presents hard evidence and data that shows how her efforts have increased basket size. The physical channel marketer, unable to present any data that draws a connection between his efforts and increased basket size, has only managed to collect anecdotal stories on how his display impacted sales.

Which marketer would you rather be? I’m betting at this point you’re likely to choose the online marketer. Obviously it’s much easier to test, measure and show results in this channel. But the physical channel marketer has a significant advantage – a tangible, real life shopping experience – if he can figure out how to control, test and measure marketing efforts in the store.

Good news. Leading retailers have done just that and can test a marketing initiative in the store just as they do online. To learn how read the How to Guide: Harnessing Big Data for Competitive Advantage.

 

Envysion Analytics is Here

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Posted in: Marketing & Sales, Operations, Retail

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We’re excited to expand our offering to include Envysion Analytics, a powerful service that is now available for People Counting.

People Counting gives retailers visibility into store sales by providing the missing inputs to create a Conversion Scorecard and dissect sales into its driving factors: traffic, conversion, and average dollars spent per transaction. Having this information at your finger tips, you can assess weak stores and take steps to improve store performance by effectively focusing on the root causes of the performance problems. For example, if traffic counts are low, marketing should work to get more people through the doors; if conversion is low, store management should review staffing levels and inventory and selection, among other things, to improve conversion rates; and if the average dollar amount spent per transaction is low, store management should review tactics being employed to increase cross- and up-sales.

Envysion Analytics is a key service enabling our customers to glean holistic insights into their store operations that they were otherwise missing. With Envysion Analytics, you have yet another means through which to improve profitability with Video-driven Business IntelligenceTM.