Removing Retail Data Guesswork: 10 Ways to Use Retailwatch to Drive Your Business

Understand your customers, network, and environment

Gathering, interpreting, and leveraging data is critical for success in today’s modern business landscape.

Retailers are constantly looking for ways to use data, whether to make pivotal business decisions, draw in high-value customers, and make long-term plans.

By adding our Retailwatch dataset to your internal data, these solutions augment your internal capabilities and empower your retail business to generate the insights you need to make deeply informed decisions.

This article explains how Retailwatch works and ten ways it can elevate your knowledge of your retail market, network, and customers. At the end are links to further reading next if you want to learn more, plus a form you can fill out to get a free sample market share report for your retail business.

The many uses of REtailwatch

Retailwatch is a collection of tools and solutions that leverage consumer spending data and other external data sources to drive insights for businesses. Retailwatch provides an external lens on your environment, network, and customers.

At Datamine, we take data privacy and security seriously. Our holistic approach means we maintain the right people, training, processes & policies, systems, and technology to enable us to derive insights for our customers from these powerful datasets in a way that protects privacy and confidentiality.

Retailwatch can be applied to many unique business problems. An excellent way to start is by considering recurring questions from your business, for example:

What is currently trending in my market?
How much market share have we got?
Where is the best catchment to open a new store?
What do my high-value customers look like?
Why are some customers spending less?
Where do our customers come from?

The core solutions of Retailwatch can be split into three broad categories: market, network, and customer solutions,

Retailwatch market solutions

Use external data to stay aware of what is going on in your market.

Retailwatch Dashboard

Retailwatch Dashboard, New Zealand’s most reliable monthly retail spend dashboard, is a free tool powered by Datamine. Offering a high-level view of retail industry trends, users can visualise customer spending across categories – both in-store and online. Based on anonymised and aggregated retail spending data, the dashboard gets updated every month - which means that anyone can stay up to date with current developments and changes in the broader retail sector.

Retail tracking

Going beyond the Retailwatch Dashboard, Retail Tracking enables you to create a more bespoke, detailed, and granular view of the market. We custom-build this solution for companies that require more specific information on how external factors impact their performance. Break out specific retail niches, group together bespoke retail groups, and feed external data into your business more frequently (up to daily). Retail tracking paints a clear picture of what is happening in the overall retail market and shows if you are ahead or behind the system.

Market share benchmarking

Market share benchmarking enables you to get a view of the performance of your key competitor groups and measure your relative performance. Tracking market share performance gives you a significant competitive edge and a clearer understanding of your position in the overall market. It also gives you a more comprehensive view of how your business progress tracks relative to shifts in the market.

Retailwatch network solutions

Retailwatch network solutions relate to store network performance and location.

Site assessment and network optimisation

Making changes to a retail network is one of the most capital-intensive exercises a retailer will make. Whether opening a new store, refurbishing, or closing an existing store, Retailwatch removes the guesswork, maximises revenue while minimising cannibalisation.

Answering questions such as:

What would the store sales be for a given location?
How much cannibalisation can I expect from my other sites?
Where will my customers come from?
If I close a store, how much revenue will be retained by the remainder of my network and how much will be lost to competitors?

Site assessment and network optimisation use customers’ spending data and analytics to understand and predict the impacts of making network changes, supporting this critical decision-making process with data-driven insights.

The scope of this solution depends on the scope of your business’s goals, from making a change to one site, choosing between site locations and catchments, or looking for opportunities to optimise your entire network.

Catchment analysis

Understanding customer behaviour within your business’s sphere of influence is critical for measuring retail store success. Catchment analysis defines catchment areas and profiles the customers located in those areas. Using catchment analysis, you can get to know your customers better to serve them best and give appropriate resources to each store for their unique situation.

Retailwatch customer solutions

Consumer spending data provides valuable insights into the priorities of your customers. Understanding spending patterns means you know more about your customer behaviours and enables tailored strategies and promotions.

Customer profiling

A knowledge discovery solution, customer profiling offers descriptive insights to understand the differences within your customer base. It is beneficial for creating informed strategies and initiatives for marketing, planning, logistics, and customer services. Use customer profiles in conjunction with churn modelling and customer segmentation.

Customer segmentation

This solution groups customers into manageable segments or categories based on an analysis of customer behaviour. By expanding the descriptive insights offered by customer profiling and creating high-level customer profile for the key groups of customers, segmentation analysis delivers invaluable tools for your marketing teams.

Share of wallet

Where and how customers spend their money within markets is valuable knowledge for businesses looking to understand their revenue. With share of wallet, you can assess your customers and know how they behave outside your business. What share of your customer spend do you have? What other competitors and other categories are they purchasing? Are there opportunities for range extension? How does this change over time?

Cross-shopping and loyalty

Have you ever wondered whether yours is the only brand your customers choose? Cross-shopping solutions measure the percentage of customers who shop uniquely at one particular brand and what proportion cross over to competing brands. In a crowded market or one with many loyalty programmes, this can be critical information to support your brand strategy.

Finding the right solution for your retail business

Just as no two businesses are the same, no universal solution suits every retailer's unique needs. Some businesses benefit significantly from one of the services already defined in this article, while a customised combination of several strategies is often a better approach.

Whether you aim to understand your customers, optimise your site network or get more context around your place on the market, using Retailwatch to inform the way you address your business’s opportunities will steer you towards success.

Get in touch with Datamine for a free consultation about how a tailored Retailwatch strategy can take away risks and guesswork in your business decision-making.