Tips for Converting Website-Driven Traffic In-Store
During a meeting with the CEO of a major department store chain, he absolutely gushed with pride about an article that listed his company's website as one of the most visited retail sites online. At the time his website was getting about 30,000 visits a month, which may not seem like a big number today, but at the time was truly impressive.
Then I showed him the results of an in-store traffic study my firm conducted for his marketing team. On the basis of the traffic counts logged in a sample of his stores, we estimated that brick-and-mortar store traffic was hundreds of millions of visits annually.
Retailers have some of the most visited websites in the world. Receiving 10 million, 20 million, 30 million visits monthly or more is impressive by any measure, but you shouldn’t pat yourself on the back if you achieve these high levels of web traffic only to leave consumers standing in the check-out line in your brick-and-mortar stores.
It’s well understood and accepted that consumers are shopping multichannel. Online visits are frequently a precursor to an in-store visit — and hopefully a sale. That said, retailers seem to be extraordinarily aware and sensitive to website visitation and conversion rates, but incredibly oblivious and insensitive to these same vital metrics for their brick-and-mortar stores. In fact, most retailers today don’t track traffic or measure conversion rates in their stores.
Instead of actually measuring traffic and conversion rates, many retailers simply use sales transactions as a surrogate for traffic in their brick-and-mortar stores. This is a gross misrepresentation of what’s actually happening in the stores and a miscalculation that could lead to a huge disconnect in the web-to-store customer experience — and ultimately hurt sales.
Think about it: If Amazon.com only measured the number of sales transactions it made and counted this as its site traffic, how do you think it would compare to the actual number of visits it was getting? Obviously, it would be a mere fraction. Furthermore, if Amazon, using these significantly lower transaction counts as a proxy for site traffic, built its infrastructure to support these lower numbers, what would the outcome be? Not a pretty picture.
While the scenario seems ridiculous in the online world, it's the norm in brick-and-mortar stores. Transactions rule while traffic and conversion metrics are “web stats” that apparently don’t seem to apply. But they do. If you want to deliver a more consistent web-to-store customer experience and capture more of the sales opportunities your website is delivering to your brick-and-mortar stores, here are a few suggestions:
- Measure actual traffic in your brick-and-mortar stores. Forget transaction counts as a proxy for traffic. This isn’t even close to good enough. Every retailer needs to measure store traffic in every location to understand the volume and timing of when consumers are visiting. They can then align staff resources to deliver adequate service levels.
- Compare website traffic to brick-and-mortar store traffic. By comparing online to offline traffic, you can begin to understand the dynamics of web-to-store behavior. For example, if spikes in online traffic precede spikes in brick-and-mortar traffic, understanding the timing and volume of these movements could help you provide a better, more seamless web-to-store experience and fewer lost sales.
- Map and track in-store conversion rates. As vital as measuring conversion is online, it's equally important in your brick-and-mortar stores. Driving a ton of traffic into your brick-and-mortar stores is pointless if it doesn’t translate into sales. Conversion is the only metric that can help retailers truly understand how well their stores are actually performing.
If you want to avoid the in-store pain that can accompany website gain, get your brick-and-mortar counterparts to pay as much attention to traffic and conversion as they do online. Having a high-traffic, flashy website is small consolation if you can’t close the deal in-store.
I know that your web team probably doesn’t often talk to the store operations team, but you need to play nice because store operations could seriously benefit from what you already know. In the end, everyone will have an advantage: the company, your shareholders and, most importantly, your customers.
Mark Ryski is the author of "Conversion: The Last Great Retail Metric" and "When Retail Customers Count." He's also the CEO and founder of HeadCount Corporation. Mark can be reached at mark.ryski@headcount.com.