Whether your business has two locations or twenty, serving varied local preferences is the key to success. Customer tastes, expectations, and spending habits vary by area, depending on the demographics of the neighborhood and the other businesses located nearby. Customer insights can help your business tailor each outlet to the preferences and buying habits of customers nearby to build loyalty and bring in new traffic.
Learn who your customers are
Your transaction-based customer insights show you who your customers are at each location. There are four types of insights to help you refine your customer personas by location:
- Geographic information, right down to the Zip+4 code, to show you exactly where each location’s traffic comes from
- Demographic data about your customers’ age group, marital status, and parenting status
- Economic information such as income level, mortgage balance, credit access, and spending habits
- Preferences such as favorite media, dining habits, product preferences, and leisure activities
Using this information, for example, an ice cream restaurant chain may discover that middle-income families with young children are the most common customers at its suburban locations, while high-earning singles are the prime customers at its downtown shops.
Give them what they want
With detailed customer personas for each store, you can tailor your product offerings, promotions, and even décor to suit local preferences. The ice cream locations that serve young suburban families should have booster seats and high chairs on hand for toddlers and babies, for example, and may perform better if they focus on flavors that are popular with children. The locations serving city singles can provide more upscale décor and offer complex flavors to suit adult palates.
The chain can also differentiate its promotions and offerings by customer preferences. A mid-day two-for-one offer could appeal strongly to stay-at-home parents with small children. An early evening “happy hour” deal at city locations might bring in singles for social time right after work. Another way to create effective offers is to append customer and local market data with social media to create indivudal promotions for each store, served to existing customers and nearby lookalike audience members.
Understand individual store performance
The same insights that show what customers want also offer a guide to understanding stores’ current performance. You can analyze each store’s offerings in tandem with its customer insights to discover what works and what needs to change. For example, if the ice cream chain has an underperforming suburban store and the customer data shows that the locals are very health-focused, adding fruit smoothies or dairy-free treats to the menu may draw in new traffic. Your social-media appended customer and market insights can help explain performance variance by location and guide your performance expectations for each location.
Track and measure each store’s performance
When the ice cream chain introduces smoothies and dairy-free treats at its underperforming store, it can use its customer insights to track and measure the results. If the new products underperform, the data will show that quickly and free the chain to focus on alternative fixes. If the new products are a success, the chain now has a proven option for current and future stores with a similar profile.
To learn more about how your business can use customer insights to improve each location’s performance, contact us at info@tranzlogic.com or (888) 855-0855.