Retail Analytics: Key to Smarter Marketing, Sales, and Procurement Decisions

Why do retailers are often faced with efficiency issues in two of their main operational areas: marketing and supply chain?

One piece of the puzzle is the collection and processing of a large, siloed, and increasingly complex volume of data.

Since the pandemic, companies have been accelerating data analytics projects to consolidate and gain visibility into the ROI of their marketing operations, refine CRM segmentation, and optimize their supply chain by cross-referencing stock data with sales.

In an industry with narrow profit margins, retail analytics provide retailers with the data they need to capture more demand than competition, make informed decisions, and increase business growth.

In this article, we explain the impact retail analytics has on your operations, along with examples and real-life use cases of retailers that have embraced data-driven decision-making.

What impact does retail analytics have on Marketing?

Impact 1 – Unifying customer journey across all points of sale to improve targeting and enhance loyalty programs.

Like most retailers, you’ve probably expanded your sales and marketing channels, both online and offline.

Retail analytics helps you consolidate sources so you can track a customer’s journey as they browse items online, visit one of your physical stores to try the product or seek advice before making a purchase either in-store or returning to your e-commerce platform.

Unifying data from all these sources provides a comprehensive picture of purchasing behavior, enabling marketing teams to send relevant product recommendations, creating a seamless shopping experience across all channels, and ultimately improving conversion rates.

The same applies to better grasp loyal customers who make purchases both in-store and online, but whose purchase data is stored in two different systems. Consolidation merges this information, allowing your marketing team to launch consistent loyalty campaigns by offering exclusive benefits based on a complete purchase history – strengthening your loyalty program.

Use Case

To optimize the ROI of their advertising campaigns, Fitness Park led a massive data project: segmenting their CRM, which revealed the feminization and rejuvenation of their members.

With this insight at hand, they were able to shift their marketing strategy, revise their messaging, and accurately track conversion rates and ROI of channels, following these changes.

With ClicData, they consolidated CRM data, gym visits, and interactions on social campaigns – bolstering marketing success while embracing data transformation.

Impact 2 – Accurately monitor your acquisition channels’ ROI

As a retailer, you also have to deploy multi-channel advertising actions every day, including social media, search, or affiliate marketing, along with in-store promotions & sales to attract new customers.

That’s where retail analytics comes into play: by consolidating all your sources, it becomes possible to measure the ROI of each channel individually, helping you allocate budgets more effectively – generating more customers while optimizing acquisition costs.

Use Case

TBS, a leading French sustainable fashion brand, was looking to boost its eCommerce performance by optimizing its acquisition budget tracking and identifying the best revenue-generating channels.

This initiative resulted in a significant improvement in high-converting traffic sources tracking, as well as an effective customer segmentation, based on their online behavior.

Leveraging retail analytics helped TBS optimize marketing investments, make data-driven decisions, and boost its online sales performance.

What impact does retail analytics have on Supply Chain?

Impact 1 – Assessing Inventory Levels and Restocking Best-Selling Items

One thing every retailer doesn’t want is to run out of stock for that one trending reference everyone’s desperate to get!

If you suddenly notice an increase in demand for a particular product, retail analytics provide supply and operational teams the ability to react quickly by instantly adjusting stock levels – avoiding any stockouts while maximizing sales opportunities.

Impact 2 – Enhancing Inventory Level Transparency With Suppliers

Picture this: one of your suppliers is facing challenges in anticipating demand due to limited information on stock levels or simply because have missed out on a promotion, leading to a sudden surge in demand.

By consolidating stock, sales, and forecast data, and sharing this information with your suppliers, you not only strengthen trust but also enhance planning capabilities. This proactive approach helps minimize the risks of delivery delays, ensuring smoother operations and happier customers.

Impact 3 – Fine-tuning sales forecasting to meet demand without excess

You’re gearing up for retail peak season. By leveraging retail analytics from historical records and external factors like seasonal trends or weather data, you can refine your sales forecasts.

This enables more precise inventory management, avoiding costly excess while ensuring maximum customer satisfaction through consistent product availability.

3 challenges, a single story

One of its markets, Carrefour, a French multinational retailer works with over 440 suppliers, generating daily datasets containing billions of rows. Committed to transparency and effective cooperation, Carrefour provides its partners with detailed sales reports, even breaking down levels by product (SKU) and by store. These reports can also be customized according to 20 distinct criteria, offering maximum flexibility.

Faced with the challenge of handling massive volumes of data from Carrefour’s Google Cloud environments, the company tackled the task of loading, processing, and making this information quickly and efficiently accessible via its supplier portal using ClicData.

The result? Data processing occurs daily within a 5-hour window, including validation and cleaning. All suppliers now have access to updated data by 8:00 AM. More than 3 billion rows from 24 months of data are processed daily using ClicData’s ETL.

Retail Analytics, A Key Asset for Optimizing the Efficiency of Your Marketing and Supply Chain Operations

Through these use cases, it becomes clear retail analytics and the consolidation of inventory level, supply chain movement, demand, and sales data are key to effective marketing strategies, procurement decisions, and retail business growth.

This commitment to consolidating retailers’ data sources paves the way for a smarter, more resilient, and customer-focused business strategy. Retail analytics isn’t just an option anymore; it’s a must-have tool for staying ahead in today’s dynamic retail landscape where omnichannel rules!

Discover how ClicData helps retailers, like you, simplify and streamline marketing, e-commerce, and supply management.