Retail is big, it’s important and retailers have challenges. Retailers don’t want (or need) advice that is generalized beyond practical use. Retailers need ideas and strategies that are actionable. When Retail Customers Count provides just that.

When Retail Customers Count is a book about how understanding the volume and timing of prospect traffic in a store can help retailers answer some of the most fundamental questions about their business including:

• Does your advertising work?
• Are you making the most out of your sales opportunity?
• Is your staff scheduling optimal?
• Which is your best performing location?
• What is your sales conversion rate?
• Are your store hours right?

Every retailer wants to know the answers to these questions, but the vast majority doesn’t have a clue how to find the answers. When Retail Customers Count uses real world examples to show retailers exactly how they can answer these questions and more with traffic analysis.

When Retail Customers Count is informative, comprehensive, actionable and extremely readable.  A book on retail traffic analysis and how it can be used by retailers has never been done - indeed very few people would even be qualified to write it. We are.

Mark Ryski has worked in and around the retail industry for over 18 years. From part-time sales clerk to marketing director for a national chain, he approaches the area of traffic analysis from a retail insider’s perspective. In addition to working directly in retail organizations, he spent 8 years with the leading software company Intuit, makers of Quicken® and QuickBooks® where as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Canada he worked closely with some of the leading retailers in North America.

In 1994 he founded HeadCount Corporation a company that provides a retail traffic monitoring, analysis and reporting service to leading retailers. His clients run the gamut from small independent merchants to large multi-national chains.

Why Count Customers?

The most fundamental of retail metrics is largely unused or misused ? if you’re not looking at traffic information, how are you managing your store?

Early in my retail career, I spent a lot of time learning. Learning about how retail business?successful retail business?is conducted. I learned about inventory management and about recruiting and training staff; I learned about retail selling, customer service, merchandising, and of course, retail marketing. During these years, I watched retail change. I watched the downfall of the traditional department store, the rise of specialty retailing and the advent of the ‘big box’ category killers. I was there when the Internet was going to change the face of retailing forever (it did, but not in the ways pundits were predicting). So here we are.

Retail is undoubtedly a far more complicated and sophisticated business than ever before. Successful retailers need to stay on their toes. History is littered with retail giants once thought to be everlasting fixtures in the retailing landscape, but now gone. However, as much as things have changed, certain fundamentals have remained unchanged?such as prospects needing to visit the store in order to make a purchase. This idea of prospect ‘traffic’ is one of the few constants in an otherwise constantly changing retail landscape. Furthermore, it is a notion that applies to virtually every retailer.  So why doesn’t everybody track traffic? Good question.

I didn’t start out being a retail traffic ‘guru’. Nope. I was just a retail marketing manager for a single location specialty store who was simply trying to understand if his advertising was working or not. Pretty simple question, isn’t it? It seemed simple enough when the owner of the store I worked for asked me how we would know if the annual marketing plan I prepared would work?how would we know if this was the right plan? As I hunted for information on measuring retail advertising, I discovered there were no simple answers?there was a lot of general information about marketing effectiveness but none that seemed to be specific enough; none that could help me answer my question.

Ultimately, my quest to find the answer to this question led me to traffic counting.

Not only did monitoring traffic help us understand if our advertising was working or not, it became apparent that traffic information was also very useful in scheduling staff,  understanding sales performance, determining store hours, planning in-store events and much, much more. Wow! This traffic information is great stuff. Why couldn’t I find anything about traffic counting in all those retail management books I read? Why is that even today, the vast majority of retailers don’t even bother to monitor store traffic, and even the ones that do only review the data periodically and usually not in any depth? I don’t really have a good answer for this. In fact, to this day, when I talk to retailers (successful major retail chains at that), I often feel like Christopher Columbus trying to convince the magistrates of the 15^th century that the world is indeed round, not flat.

When Retail Customers Count is the book I would have greatly appreciated reading back in my early days. The book covers a wide range of ways traffic analysis can be used to help retailers (and service businesses that receive pedestrian traffic) manage their operations more effectively. The book is as relevant for independent single location retail merchants as it is for executives of mega chains, and it really doesn’t matter if your store sells shoes, shovels, crafts or cars?retailers in virtually every retail segment can benefit from traffic analysis.

Although there is a multitude of uses for traffic analysis, I’ve focused on the areas that would be of most interest to most retailers. Specifically, here’s what is in store (pardon the pun).

• Chapter 1: Measuring the Impact of Advertising? It’s true, you really can measure the impact of your advertising and promotions. This chapter is full of examples of advertising traffic responses, setting objectives and the like.

• Chapter 2: Setting and Refining Store Hours? Traffic analysis can provide all sorts of insights to assist with decision support, and setting store hours is one of those questions that retailers are constantly grappling with. Traffic analysis can help.

• Chapter 3: The Impact of Weather on Traffic? You can’t control the weather, but you can control what you do when weather happens. This chapter will describe the different ways that weather can impact traffic and what you can do to make the most of it.

• Chapter 4: Sales Conversion– Turning Shoppers into Buyers ? This is arguably the most critical chapter in the book, as sales conversion is among the most important performance measures in retail. This chapter is a must read.

• Chapter 5: Staff Planning? With labor being one of the largest expenses retailers have, using traffic analysis to optimize staff schedules is the best way to make sure you have the right number of staff- not too many and not too few.

• Chapter 6: Holidays and Special Events? Holidays and special events alter traffic patterns in your store, and traffic analysis will show you how you can make the most out of these times.              

• Chapter 7: Multi-Location Traffic Analysis? Managing multiple locations is a significant challenge, and so is doing the traffic analysis for multiple locations. However, the rewards are also significant. Which is your best performing location? Are you sure? Traffic analysis can tell you.         

• Chapter 8: Web, Phone and Store Traffic: the Complete Picture? We know, we know?retailing today is more than just bricks and mortar physical locations. In this chapter, you will learn how you can (and should) look across all your channels to get a complete view of traffic? in the store, on the Web and phone.

• Chapter 9: The Strategic Value of Traffic Insights- Traffic analysis is not just for the floor manager or to give the advertising manager a clue about advertising effectiveness; the senior ‘big brains’ of the retail operation can also benefit from traffic analysis. This chapter will show you how.     

• Chapter 10: Traffic and Service Businesses?OK, the book title is a bit misleading…. The fact is if you run a business that receives customers or prospects into your physical site, you can benefit from traffic analysis. Traffic counting isn’t just for retailers.

This is not an academic text nor exactly a step-by-step ‘how to’ book, but rather a practical guide incorporating real-world examples of how traffic analysis can be used to help you be a more effective retailer?providing specific and detailed examples of how you can manage costs, measure results and drive performance using traffic analysis.

We use a lot of traffic charts in this book?charts are great. Charts show you in an instant what it would take me many pages to describe. It makes this book richer and (I hope) more meaningful to you, the reader.

If you are a career retailer, what we share in this book will change the way you look at your business. If you’re just starting your retail career like I was, we hope this information helps you get farther, faster.